Getting Started

This page will help you as you begin to use your wiki. All the basics will be covered here, with links to detailed instructions and examples. Throughout these help pages, we’ll link to pages that contain specific instructions about a topic, for example, how to make a new page; feel free to click on them when needed.

If you have further questions, first check out the PmWiki documentation; it’s quite extensive. If that doesn’t help, ask your instructor to assist you.

General Topics

What are we trying to do? | What do I need to know? | What else can I do? | Other places to get help | A few things to watch for | What’s the basic structure of this wiki?

All Topics (open in new window)

Create a new page | Add content to a page | Create a link from one page to another, both inside the wiki | Create a link from a page inside the wiki to a page outside the wiki | Make changes to a page | Delete a page | Sign and date-stamp your name | Roll back a page to an earlier version | See what changes have been made to the wiki recently | Emphasized text | Headings | Lists | Changing the color of text | Other emphasized text | Other simple formatting | Uploading a file and making a link to it | Displaying a picture | Groups | Redirecting a page

What are we trying to do?

We’re going to build a website.

A website is a collection of pages and links between them.

This website is a wiki, a collaborative website. A group of people, working together, create and maintain it.

All wikis start small, with just a few pages. Over time, they grow as large as the group desires it to be. The group also has complete control over the structure of the wiki. They can change and adapt their wiki any way they want to. This wiki, like most wikis, also allows you to display images and upload documents. But most of the activity on any wiki is simply writing.

Important!

You can’t break the wiki. It’s designed to be easy to use: easy to create new content, easy to correct mistakes, easy to change almost anything. And, since it’s a collaborative effort, there will be plenty of people to help out.

What do I need to know?

To build the wiki, you’ll need to know how to:

You’ll also need to know, as you maintain the wiki, how to:

What else can I do?

You can create wiki pages without any formatting, just blank lines between paragraphs. They’ll look just fine, and people will be able to read them, which is the whole point. But if you wish, you can format your text:

You can also upload files and make links to them so other wiki users can download them. For example, you can upload a MS Word document that can then be downloaded by any wiki user. You can also make graphic, sound and video files available. Here’s how:

A couple of other useful features are:

Other places to get help

  • The PmWiki developer’s site, at pmwiki.org, has extensive documentation, for beginners, intermediate users and wiki administrators. At that site, start with Basic Editing, then check out the Documentation Index for more advanced help.

A few things to watch out for

  • Put a carriage return between paragraphs! Otherwise, your paragraphs will run together. If there’s white space between the lines in the editing page, your paragraphs will be nicely separated.
  • Don’t put spaces at the beginning of a line! Spaces at the beginning of a line make the line “display as entered”, with no formatting at all. This is rarely what you want to do. If your text doesn’t look right - mono-spaced font, line going off the right edge of the screen - you probably have a space (or several) at the left margin. It’s common to get spaces at the margin when you paste in text from a word processing program that has tabs at the beginning of each paragraph. To see how to indent paragraphs, see other simple formatting
  • In links, spelling counts. If your link doesn’t work, first check that it’s spelled correctly. Capitalization and spaces can make all the difference.

What’s the basic structure of this wiki?

It’s useful to explain the structure of the wiki, particularly if it’s at all specialized. The wiki structure is created by its users, but there are ways to set up a framework, using groups, pre-made pages and templates. Here’s an example:

This wiki will have four group pages:

  • Each group page will contain: content, links, readings, resources, and discussions.

The wiki will also have student pages:

  • Each student page will contain whatever the student wants to create, including links to other pages, images and uploaded files.