In this basic tutorial, we will walk through all of the steps necessary to create a new wiki article from scratch. If you just want to edit an existing article, much of this tutorial will not be of interest. Instead, you may want to read the article editing help topic.
If you are writing your first article for the wiki, you may know that it is completely new (if not, try doing a “search” or check the “title list”). In such a case, type the name of the proposed article into the “create or find page” field and click on the “Go” button. In this example, we will create a new wiki article called “Article Example”. Given below is an annotated screen shot of doing this first step.
Screen Shot 1 – Use “Create or Find Page”
When you click on the “Go” button, the web page will refresh and look as follows:
Screen Shot 2 – Verification that no such article exists
Now, you would click on the “Edit” menu button tab. This will bring up a new web page which will display a text area field for entering your article. This is shown below:
Screen Shot 3 – Blank Article Form
There is some special wiki syntax that tells the wiki how to format (display) the article and also how to categorize it. To ensure that your article is filed under an appropriate category, you have enter the name of the category within a double set of brackets and proceed the category name with the word “Category” followed by a colon. There should not be any spaces between the colon and the category name. If you include a space, this will cause a new category to be created that has a leading space in it. This is illustrated next:
Screen Shot 4 – Entering the article’s Category
Also shown in the screen shot is entering a brief description of the type of change that is being made. In this case, we simply write that this is the first version.
Next, you will typically enter in the body of your article. If you wish, you may copy and paste it from another source (such as Word), but keep in mind that the wiki has its own way to format text.
Screen Shot 5 – Entering the rest of the article
As you are writing your article, be sure to make use of the Preview button. The preview button is your best friend. It will show you how the article will ultimately look on the wiki, but without committing the article text into the wiki database. But, this also means that you haven’t really entered anything into the wiki until you click on the Submit button. In the next screen shot you will see what our example article looks like after using the preview button.
Screen Shot 6 – Use Preview to see article formatting
That’s the basics. At this point, you would finish by clicking on the “Submit” button, and the web page will show how your article looks in its final form. If you then spot an error or want to make additional formatting changes, you can still click on the “Edit” menu tab button, and make further changes. But don’t forget to enter another brief note as to what kind of change (primarily) you are making.
