Wikis

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These notes are part of a Wikis, Photo Galleries, and Mailing Lists course for WSC faculty and staff.

Contents

What's a Wiki?

  • a website that is particularly easy to edit
  • a collaboration tool
  • a place to organize your documents
  • a public place to publish your work
  • a private place to keep records and documentation
  • a place where nothing gets lost
  • a place where the public can interact with us
  • a blog
  • a frame of mind


Wikis at Western

Why Wikis?

  • Easier to create web content than Dreamweaver
  • Simple to fix other’s mistakes
  • Built-in source control – no information is lost
  • No special software – just a browser
  • Accountable – you know who does what
  • Supported by CMT help desk
  • Brings Google traffic to Western
  • Any motivated student can figure this out – make the students do your web work
  • Learn by example (tons at http://en.wikipedia.org)
  • Lots of configuration options

Getting a Wiki

All you need to do to create your own wiki is ask for one (submit a workorder to CMT). The only requirements are:

  • Must be for a WSC-related purpose
  • Shouldn’t duplicate existing wikis.

General policy: one public wiki per department (MCIS, ESS, BAE, …), student / school groups (sga, peak productions, wp), internal wikis for administrative departments (admissions, registrar, …)

You’ll be asked why but that’s mainly to avoid duplication

Tim Zappe does wiki setup / admin

Administering a Wiki

Setup by CMT:

  • Who is allowed to see the wiki (public facing or internal – internal wikis can be limited to specific user communities)
  • Sysop account – an account that has special powers
  • Allow / prohibit anonymous editing
  • Verify email addresses of new users
  • Approve users (hasn’t been done at WSC yet)
  • Create subpage links
  • File size and type restrictions
  • Skin (CMT hasn’t had time to fiddle with this ..)

Things you can control:

  • Sidebar design (Mediawiki:sidebar)

Inside a Wiki

Just like files on your disk drive, everything in the wiki has to have a name. Name have two parts: a namespace (if omitted, a “normal page” is assumed) and a name. There are just a few namespaces to know:

  • talk: a page to talk about what’s on a related page
  • user: Identifies the accounts in the wiki
  • image: pictures
  • media: things like .doc, .pdf, .xls files - really the same as image:
  • mediawiki: special stuff inside the wiki

You will see these “page names” on the web address

Long Term Administration

It’s good to have someone who will “watch over” a wiki. The easiest way to do this is to peek at “Recent Changes” every now and then. Internal wikis probably don’t need this.

Wiki spammers sometime come in and drop “link spam” in our wikis. I have to revert these pages. Hasn’t been happening lately.

Special Pages

Special pages are how we can administer the wiki as a whole. Use these to find users, files, and content. Or use “search” – note that you can target certain kinds of pages

Go to the WP wiki and let’s look at the special pages:

Names

Wikis contain references to things in the wiki – you do this by knowing the name of the thing you want to talk about.

You can refer to things that don’t exist – if you do, you’ll usually get a link that you can click to create this thing.

Naming is a big deal! All users share the same namespace so you have to be careful that two people don’t accidentally use the same name.

Names should be descriptive – no need for cryptic abbreviations

The capitalization of the first letter is ignored.

The “/” is special – this creates sub-pages. It doesn’t work in other name spaces.

Creating an Account

We’re going to make the SGA wiki our playground. We’ll practice (later) by working on web pages for student clubs. If there’s an existing wiki you want to work in use that instead.

Before you can edit, you need an account. (Note that the SGA wiki allows anonymous editing! This probably isn’t a good idea …)

Please create an account there. Use your real name, like John Peterson. Don’t worry about spaces in your account name.

Don’t use a super-secure password.

If things don’t seem to be working correctly, close your browser and restart it.

Account Options

  • You don’t need to provide an email (unless the wiki is setup to require this)
  • You probably don’t need a real name
  • You get a “user page” – user:Your Name – this is linked to all of your work and in page histories. You ought to put something there. Note you can click into this at the top.
  • You get a preferences page – lots of stuff you can play with. You can ask for mail when certain pages (your “watchlist”) change.
  • Note the link to your contributions


Page Management

It’s important to have a plan when putting together a wiki – what pages are the basic sources of information? Is there a naming convention so that you will know where to link pages and how to name them? What sort of things have separate pages? Linking?

Let’s look at the [WP wiki:

  • Note the use of dates to keep pages unique
  • The front page organizes things
  • User pages hold biographical info and have links to trips – real names are used. Photos and email addresses encouraged.

Subpages

Using a / creates a subpage name (when enabled)

This creates a link to the “main” page.

See http://wiki.western.edu/mcis/index.php/CIS/Schedule

Histories

Every page in a wiki has a page history – this is a “time machine” that lets you see all of the older versions. If someone messes up a page, you can always go back to see what it used to be.

You can “revert” a page by editing one of the old versions and saving it.

You can “compare versions” to see what has changed – also look at “previous diff” and “next diff” to see how a page changes.

Let’s look at a history – note that you can easily cycle through the different revisions of the page.

Recent Changes

The “recent changes” page gives you an overview of recent wiki activity.

You can go straight to the history or the diff (a look at the changes just made in the page). Note the revert link – this is an easy way to get rid of junk. You won’t see some things unless you’re logged in or a sysop.

The MCIS recent changes

Basic Page Editing

Editing a wiki page is just messing around with the text that sits “behind” a page. The text uses special “markup” to handle formatting – I’ve given you a cheat sheet for basic wiki markup.

The buttons along the top of the edit box make it easier to do some things like boldface or signatures.

You can always “preview” to see what your page will look like.

Don’t type too much at once – you might lose your edit window.

Blank lines indicate paragraph breaks.

You can edit a single section with local edit buttons

Create a Home Page

Start by creating a home page in the SGA wiki – log in and click on your name at the top. This should tell you that the page doesn’t exist.

Use the cheat sheet to do the following:

  • Use headings to split up your page
  • Use font changes, bullets
  • Try some of the other formatting things like numbered lists, verbatim text, or indented paragraphs.
  • Using Word to get spelling / grammar checks – you can cut and paste this into your wiki editor.

Links

Next we need to add two kinds of hyperlinks: External hyperlinks to websites outside the wiki – use either a url (http://western.edu) or a url in brackets: [http://western.edu]

Internal page links: use [[page name]] The page doesn’t have to exist yet!

You often want the link text to be different from the actual link, like [http://western.edu WSC] or [[Some Page|Another Page in the wiki]]

When linking to external sites, always cut/paste links from the browser directly.

Note that internal links to pages that don’t exist are red. It’s bad wiki hygiene to leave these around.

Add links and another page to your homepage.

Pictures and Attachments

Some things in the wiki aren’t text – pictures and attachments live on a different kind of page. There are two names for this namespace: image: and media. They are the same thing but it’s easier to see what’s going on if you use image: for pictures and media: for attachments

The kind of thing is determined by the file extension: .jpg, .ppt, .doc, .xls, .pdf

The simplest way to get a picture into the wiki is [[image:picturename.jpg]] This will place the picture directly in the page at this point. If the picture doesn’t exist you’ll see an upload link.

When you upload you can add some identifying text.

You can use lots of options, like this: [[image:picture.jpg|option1|option2|Caption]]

Options:

  • right, left – push the picture to the right or left side and let text flow around it
  • thumb – keep the picture small
  • 400px – make the picture 400 pixels wide
  • frame – draw a little frame around it

Picture naming is tricky - use dates to avoid name clashes

Add a picture to your home page!

An attachment works like a picture except that it’s represented by a download link.

There are two ways to get at these: the upload page and the download link.

The upload page is where you can replace an attachment with a new version. The easiest way to get there is through recent changes or a search on the name of the attachment.

Place an attachment on your homepage and then replace with a new version.

Verbatim Text

Sometimes you want text to come out just as typed. There’s two ways to do this:

  • A space at the start of a line
  • The magic line: <pre>, with </pre> at the end

This latter method is easier if you’re using cut/paste. The former happens a lot by accident!

Moving Pages

One thing that you often need to do is change the name of a page. This is done by a “redirect” – it forwards the wiki to a different page. The “move” tab on a page accomplishes this – it replaces the current page with a redirect to a new page. It does not change pages that reference the old location. A redirect looks like this: #REDIRECT [[newpage]]

Math and Special Characters

Wikipedia uses a special math package to create math formulas. We don’t have it installed but if enough people ask CMT can make things like this work - see Math formulas in Mediawiki to learn what can be done.

There are lots of special characters: [1]

For example, Ω

Definition Lists

A definition list contains pairs of words (or phrases) and their definitions. 

; Definition lists
; item1 : definition1
; item2 : definition2
Definition lists
item1 
definition1
item2 
definition2

HTML Tags

Html tags are enclosed in <> and are usually placed in pairs around affected text, with a / to indicate the close of the tag.

  • Subscript: <sub> - a 2
  • Superscript: <sup> - a 2
  • Teletype font: </tt> - This is teletype font
  • Line break: <br> (no need to close it!)

One
Two
Three

  • Deleted text: <del> - This is deleted
  • Centered text: <center>
In the middle!

Font and Color Changes

This is really being done at the HTML level - you need to know a little HTML to understand what is happening here. I'll throw some examples in here that you can cut and paste.

Change the font:

  • Some text in the verdana font
  • Some text in a bigger font
  • Some text in a different color
  • Some text with a blue background

Boxes:

This is some text in a blue box - note that using div extends the box to the margin

This has a border - you can use a border on individual words too.

You often need padding in a border

You can also indent the region


This floats right
With a green border!

See http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_colornames.asp for color names you can use.

Wiki Image Galleries

An alternative to uploading a big photo gallery through the gallery software is the wiki gallery. It looks like this: 

<gallery>
image:picture1|caption1
image:picture2|caption2
</gallery>

Unfortunately you have to upload every photo separately. If you go to my user page in the SGA wiki, you can copy the gallery to your page and play with it.

The Magic __NOTOC__

Once you have three or more headings within a page, you automatically get a “table of contents”. You can make this go away using __NOTOC__ (that’s two underlines on either side) to make it go away.

Tables

This is how you line things up across the page: 

{| border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5" align="center" 
! Caption 1 
! Caption 2
|- 
| Row 1, Col 1
| Row 1, Col 2
|- 
| Row 2, Col 1
| Row 2, Col 2
|- 
|}

generates

Caption 1 Caption 2
Row 1, Col 1 Row 1, Col 2
Row 2, Col 1 Row 2, Col 2

There are a million examples in the Mediawiki documentation – try some of them!

Beware – our version of Mediawiki is a little out of date so there’s no edit button to create a table.

Templates

Templates are a way to get a common piece of content, perhaps customized, onto a lot of pages. I won’t tell you how but if you want to have some sort of common piece of information on a lot of pages this is the right way to go. Ask an expert for help!

See pages like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln for an example of what templates can do.

Photo Prep

The photos you place in the wiki, especially ones on frequently visited pages, should look nice.

Use Gimp to crop, resize, and do exposure correction on your photos. Sometimes a border or some other effect is nice.

I’ve written about this for CIS120 at http://wiki.western.edu/mcis/index.php/CIS120/GimpShop I’ll do a quick demo if people want to see it.

All Done!

You are now wiki experts!

If you need help with your wiki you’re welcome to contact me. Or the students at the help desk.

If you have any comments on how I can make this presentation better I’d be happy to hear them.

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