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Etiquette - please be considerate!
A wiki is a collaborative tool; by default anyone who is authorised to use the wiki can edit any page. In an ideal world everyone would be polite and considerate of everyone else at all times. Unfortunately in the real world this does not happen.
- By default consider a User page to be personal and refrain from editing it unless asked.
- Some pages, or indeed some entire wikis, may ask that you email someone about changes rather than edit the page yourself; please respect choices like this.
In summary: please be sensible and considerate - if in doubt contact someone about whose edit you are in doubt by some other means (face-to-face conversation is good for this) rather than engaging in edit wars!
Editing a wiki page
Wikis use special markup to format a page. This markup is not difficult to understand and many pages can be edited without needing to use any parts of it.
If you want to:
- edit an existing page, select the edit tab at the top of the page or alternatively an edit link at the appropriate place in the page (by headings). This opens the page, or selection, in a text editing box.
- create a new page, create a link to it by editing another page. You need to put the new page name in double square brackets, for example
[[my new page]]
, then save the page and follow the link that has been created.
Once you have finished editing select the Show preview button towards the bottom of the edit page to see if your changes look correct. The text editing box remains, underneath the preview; if you need to make any more changes make them in this box (don't select the edit tab again!). Finally, put a short, relevant, comment in the Summary box and select the Save page button.
To help you, each wiki has:
- a special Sandbox page whose purpose is to provide somehere for you to experiment with editing. If your wiki's title was "Example Wiki" and the wiki name was "eg" then the Sandbox would be
https://wiki.cam.ac.uk/eg/Sandbox
. The image below is of part of a Sandbox page, showing some text.
The image below here is taken after selecting the edit tab and shows the text editing box, with the text typed in. As you can see, there is no special markup needed to give plain paragraphs:
- inbuilt help pages, linked from the navigation section to the left of each page. These include a specific page giving help on editing For the "Example Wiki" above, these would be
https://wiki.cam.ac.uk/eg/Help:Editing
, and it is also linked from the main help page (e.g.https://wiki.cam.ac.uk/eg/Help:Contents
).
Last updated: February 2011