How to Edit Pages and Write in the Wiki

This wiki is built using the software "PmWiki". Wikipedia for what its worth is written using software called "mediawiki". These are two different things, so if you know how to mark things up in wikipedia this is going to be very similar but not exactly the same.

For reference you can go to the default help pages [[PmWiki.CollectedInfo|here]. I've found that the help topics contained there are fairly technical, and were not good for initial learning, so I am going to create a custom help page aimed at teaching Novitas staff how to edit this wiki.

Most of this page is going to be a table with two columns. The left column will show what the "code" in the wiki looks like. Then in the right column you will get to see what that code looks like in the finished page.

In PmWiki you can find references for most of the most basic markup options directly below the editing window every single time you edit a page.

Basic Editing

Spacing and Plain Text

So the first thing to explain in wiki markup is plain text. It doesn't always appear the way you want it to. White space, such as hitting the spacebar more than once, or the enter key only once or more than twice goes away in the finished page.

For example                              this,






shows up like this.

And this,
looks like this

Letters and numbers don't inherently have special meaning, but different types of punctuation are used to create special appearances and effects.

Links

The most important mark up in a wiki is creating links to other pages. This is how you browse the information and also how you create new pages. If you want a page to exist that doesn't, you first create a link in an existing page. After you save that page, follow the link to the new empty page, and you can start creating a new page.

Page names are case sensitive, but single spaces don't affect the link. I generally avoid using spaces in links to prevent complications where possible. The first letter of a page name is NOT case sensitive. For this wiki I have designed most pages to be completely lower cased for uniformity.

Groups

Each page is in a group. Different groups could have the same page name in them. Groups are useful because different groups can have different rules to how they work. For example the "Plot" group has a password preventing anyone from reading it without authorization. The "Rules" group can be viewed by anyone. More complex links include group information. If one group needs to reference a page in another group you MUST include the group name.

A link can also be made to say anything, not just the destination page name. This is done by using another very common bit of punctuation: the pipe "|". A pipe is what you get if you hit the "shift+\" right above your enter key.

More to come...

Categories: Tutorial