More on Working with Wikis

Finding Help Information

Some guidance on searching for information beyond that provided in our Getting_Started_Editing_Wiki_Pages.

On our (PCUG) wiki's look at:

• the navigation Help page which contains a variety of useful links
• the Editing help page, which may be accessed via the link at the bottom when editing any wiki page

Otherswise, look at:

• Mediawiki Help guide contents which provides links to a large number of pages with more info
• MediaWiki reference card is a one page summary of important MediaWiki editing commands, intended to be printed out and used next to the computer.

Quick Links

• located in the left menu bar (or in the drop down menu in the mobile view) are 'navigation', 'search' and 'toolbox'
• these serve as quick access to information areas, or functions more likely to be accessed frequently.

See the Mediawiki Help Navigation page for more details.

More Editing Trickery

Changing Text Color

See MediaWiki Text color page for guidance on how to change text and background color (nb. this is done with raw HTML, as wiki markup does not include color commands). You can specify color values either by using one of the sixteen named colors (aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, and yellow), or as a hexadecimal RGB color value.

There are several HTML codes you can use, but span is likely the most useful. With this, you can change either the foreground text color, or the background color, or both (as here) using a command like:

<span style="color:purple; background:silver">colored text</span>

to render this text as colored text

Indexing Pages using Categories

Categories are a useful means of collecting together a group of pages. To "create" a category you just start using one, by including a suitable category tag near the bottom of some page. This tag looks like:

[[Category:new_category_name]]

As soon as you add such a Category tag, the system will assign a new category page for it if it does not already exist. And if its new, the link will be in red, meaning if you select it you'll be asked to edit the "content" of the category page - which is separate to the index listing that appears automatically below this. And if you don't put any text in at this point, anyone browsing the category page will likewise be nagged for some content until something is actually saved there. Hence I recommend adding a simple 1 line description of what the category is for. And then its just a matter of adding the same category tag to other pages to group them all together.

You can access any specific category index by following the link to it at the bottom of any page belonging to the category.

And you can use the Special Categories index, which can be accessed using the toolbox SpecialPages link, to see a list of all categories in use on this wiki.

More information is available from the Mediawiki Help Categories page.

Printing Pages

To print a wiki page, first select the Printable version toolbox link to display a page formatted for printing. Then use your browser's Print command to print this page.

Page and Change History

To access the history of who has made changes to any wiki page, just select the History tab on the top of any page.

The What links here toolbox link displays a page with details of all other pages on this wiki that links to the current page.

The navigation Recent changes link displays a list of all recent changes to any of the wiki pages.

Special Pages

The SpecialPages link in the toolbox takes you to an index of a large number of special pages, which are automatically created by the wiki system upon request, that provide a wide variety of information on the operation of the wiki, including:

• All Pages index
• Categories index
• List of Registered Users who have logged in to the wiki

and many others. Just explore to see!

Moving/Renaming Pages

Moving (renaming) a page means giving it another name, and is done by using the "move" tab. This renames the page, but also moves it's editing history, and leaves behind a redirect on the old page, so that links (which are not automatically changed) do not break.

See Mediawiki Help Moving a page, and Mediawiki Help Redirects.

Deleting Pages

Is not recommended as it goes against the wiki philosophy of sharing information. Rather you should just use the #Moving/Renaming Pages capability.

However, if there is a really good reason to delete a page, then one of the wiki sysops can do this. You need to contact the website committee to request this.

See Also

• our Getting Started Editing Wiki Pages guide
• or the Mediawiki Help guide contents