Views
How to edit wiki pages
From KMWiki
A wiki like Mediawiki is a hyperlinking word processor, where you edit the words, create articles, and then Mediawiki handles the saving, searching and display of the information.
Contents |
[edit] Introduction
Its worthwhile spending a moment to contrast this with the process when you work with word to create a new document.
With Word, you use word.exe, create and save a file called MyDocument.doc, and then save that in a folder on a hard drive, or upload it into a document management system. Search for a document is handled by the operating system or your PC, or by search in the document management system. To open the word document later, there is a load time for Word, and the document.
With a wiki, you open a website. Create an article and press save. The wiki attends to saving, search, and display. No separate .doc or other file is created for the article - the types text is stored away in a database for retrieval and layout when you want it. To open the document later, the browser is needed, and retrieval from the database is extremely quick.
[edit] Why wikify knowledge?
The reasons why you should consider wikifying content are:
- speed of creation. As nicely formatted web pages are automatically created with table of contents, headings and bullets, the time investment to create and edit the knowledge object is smaller than with Word. The exception to this is where significant tables are involved (see later)
- speed of retrieval by knowledge consumer. It is much faster to conect with that knowledge using the wiki search, and the speed of display onscreen is much faster than sending much larger word documents around the world.
- interconnects: the ability to cross refer to other knowledge in the wiki simply by referring to the article name is extremely valuable to enrich the content. Typing Product x is a live hyperlink to the wiki article called Product x.
- categories: out of the box the easy adding of user defined categories to tag pages means you can easily get A-Z lists of pages which have been given the same tag. This is very valuable to traverse the knowledge.
[edit] so what's the bad news?
The bad news is that the editing experience is not quite Word.
In all things other than tables, it's actually better as it is brutally efficient at creating nicely displayed content by using some simple typing conventions. Given that conventions do not require mouseclicks, but are typed, it is actually more rapid to create the content, but not as visually pleasant (yet) in the typing/editing phase.
[edit] So, what do I need to know?
Like all things, there are many things you can learn, but ahandful of things that once known enable you to deal with the vast majority of cases.
Now, there are only six major things in writing text that you need to do (other than typing body copy....):
- create headings
- indicate bullets
- indicate a numbered list
- insert a link to another wiki page
- insert a hyperlink to other web content # insert an image
[edit] Creating headings
Headings re created by placing equals signs either side of the heading, like this
== Heading ==
It starts at two equals signs - if you use only one the text is styled like the article heading, which is probably not what you want.
So, pretty simple.
If you have more than 3 of these headings in the article, a table of contents is automatically created for you. You would not believe how much time I spent reseaching on the web trying to work out how to insert a table of contents into a wiki page. I only had two headings in my article.... I gave up the research, continued on with my article adding several more headings, saved, and voila - my table of contents arrived!
So, two equals signs either side is the first heading level.
If you want a sub heading, you use three equals signs, so
=== Sub heading text ===
Pretty easy. Guess what the next subheading level is (ie sub-sub heading?). Yes, it's four equals signs!
==== sub sub heading text ====
There is a button on the editing toolbar where you can select text and then click the button to make it a heading (it inserts the equals signs) but its much faster simply to type the equals signs.
[edit] Indicating bullets
Bulleted lists are fairly common in writing articles for others to read, and you indicate a bullet using the asterisk.
* bulleted text * bulleted text
Which looks like
- bulleted text
- bulleted text
Sub bullets, and su sub bullets, follow the same convention as for headings - just add more asterisks!
So
* bulleted text * bulleted text ** sub bullet ** sub bullet *** sub sub bullet *bulleted text
Looks like
- bulleted text
- bulleted text
- sub bullet
- sub bullet
- sub sub bullet
- bulleted text
Bulleted lists are a good way to keep lists of things visually tight for people to read.
[edit] Numbered lists
Numbered lists are the natural complement to Bulleted lists, and are very similar in usage. You indicate a numbered list item using the # character.
# numbered text # numbered text
Which looks like
- numbered text
- numbered text
Sub numbers, and sub sub numbers, follow the same convention as for headings - just add more #'s!!
So
* bulleted text * bulleted text ** sub bullet ** sub bullet *** sub sub bullet *bulleted text
Looks like
- bulleted text
- bulleted text
- sub bullet
- sub bullet
- sub sub bullet
- bulleted text
[edit] categories
[edit] Text formatting
To make text ```bold``` either select the text and click the B button on the toolbar, or type three aposterophes either side of the text.
To make text ``italic`` either select the text and click the I button on the toolbar, or type two aposterophes either side of the text. One caution - reading italicised text on a computer screen is awful, so be nice to your readers and use sparingly if at all.
Colors
[edit] you can also cheat!
Of course, the text in a wiki article is just text, so you can cut and paste that to another editor like Word, do your manipulations/edit and then cut and paste back into the wiki article.
I sometimes do this to take advantage of search and replace,
