From Egs Mayhem

Revision as of 06:30, 13 August 2007

On making your wiki page a little fancier.

MediaWiki Manual

MediaWiki manual: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Contents

There are many software packages that implement a wiki site. The one used here on the Mayhem wiki site is called MediaWiki, which is also the wiki system that powers Wikipedia and its sister projects. Not all wiki packages support the same features, but nearly all of them support the same basic (non-advanced) editing features. Keep this in mind if you're hopping across many different wikis.

Links

Wikilinks

In the early days of wikis, the typical way to create an intra-wiki ("internal") link was through a format called WikiCase (also known as CamelCase). Any word that had more than one capital letters was presumed to be an internal wiki link, and was turned into a link. For any site that wanted to put on a semblance of a professional face, this way of creating links was undesirable, not to mention a little awkward when attempting to create CamelCased words that should not be links, and thus often-times inappropriate. These types of wiki systems can identified by the characteristic capitalization of links, e.g. CreatingLinksWithWikiCase.

A alternate format introduced back then, and extended considerably by more complex wiki systems since then, is to surround the hot text with double square-brackets ('' and ''). This format permits links to appear more natural, e.g. [[Creating links without WikiCase]] results in Creating links without WikiCase.

Sometimes you want different hot texts to point to the same page, or otherwise have the hot text completely different from the page name. This difference can be accomplished by using a vertical bar (|) to separate the target page name from the hot text, e.g. [[Creating links without WikiCase|a decidedly less lame method of hotlinking]] results in a decidedly less lame method of hotlinking

External links

Any chunk of text that is "obviously" a url (web address) is automatically turned into hyperlink, e.g. Go read http://www.elgoonishshive.com/ now!

External links can also be surrounded by single square brackets ('[' and ']') to substitute different hot text to the proper link. The substitute text follows the url within the brackets e.g. [http://www.elgoonishshive.com/ El Goonish Shive]! Note that unlike wikilinks, you do not need a vertical bar (|) between the url and the hot text, just a space (urls, by definition, cannot contain a true space).

Because of the encyclopedia-oriented origins of MediaWiki, external links that would be invisible (blank hot text) turn into numbered footnote links, e.g. [http://www.elgoonishshive.com/] (wrapped in [...], and has no hot text).

Suppressing linking

To suppress creating links out of wikitext that would be interpreted as links, surround the offending text with <nowiki>...</nowiki>. Text after <nowiki> tag have "wiki-interpretation" turned off. The </nowiki> tag turns "wiki-interpretation" back on. This pair of tags also applies to any other special wiki notation (e.g. templates, categories, text formatting), but become very useful when trying to teach linking to others.

Recap/summary: Links

Double square brackets ([[...]]) = internal link.

Single square brackets ([...]) = external link.

Raw, "obvious" urls are turned into self-named hyperlinks.

The special wiki tags <nowiki>...</nowiki> suppresses creating links, to help generate examples.

Namespaces

The 'User' Namespace

Every wiki-registered user gets an 'automatic' personal page under the 'User' namespace, formed by sticking your username after 'User:' as the page name; this page isn't strictly automatic nor personal in the typical sense, just that the MediaWiki software system understands that your user name under the 'User' namespace should be meaningful. In fact, you can have anything following 'User:' to populate/pollute the 'User' namespace (thus not automatic), but, again, the wiki software implicitly understands that sticking your username after 'User:' is deterministic and meaningful. It's still all regular wiki pages, just that the wiki system has some special considerations for pages in the 'User' namespace.

Consider using your User-space page for OOC material: notes, messages, bookmarks, blog.

Note that these pages are nominally personal, but not private. Be aware that anyone/everyone can still view all the pages and/or edit them.

The Main (or blank) Namespace

The main namespace is unnamed (or blank). Any page name that does not contain a colon is understood to mean the main namespace. If you want to be explicit about indicating the main namespace (e.g. due some weird wiki parsing rules), the main namespace is blank, e.g. [[:Main_Page]] points the Main_Page page in the main namespace, whereas [[Main_Page]] might mean the main page in the local namespace or some other weird interpolation (can happen with fancy MediaWiki extensions).

In most cases, a namespace-less page name means the main namespace.

Your page in the main namespace can contain whatever you like pertaining to you. For consistency, considering using the main namespace for in-character material, and the User namespace for out-of-character material.

Sub-pages (or When Your Wiki Page Gets Too Big)

The wiki system (MediaWiki) on this site permits pages to have sub-pages hierarchically (i.e. sub-sub-pages, sub-sub-sub-pages, etc.). You can use this feature to divide your large page into multiple sub-pages, attach related or ancillary pages, or to keep complete copies of some other page.

The sub-page feature is also useful if you intend to revamp a busy page or test an experimental feature: make copy of the original into a sub-page for yourself, edit and re-edit it to your heart's content, then copy back to the main page in a single cut-and-paste.

Recap/summary: Namespaces

For user name "NewBunny":

Start wikilinks with '[[:' to indicate "I really mean just a link to the page, not some special action it might cause" (e.g. [[:User:NewBunny]], [[:Category:Categories]]).

Categories

Categories is a MediaWiki feature to help automatically group disparate pages around a common element. Pages that are marked as being in a category are subject to being automatically included into the relevant category's list of pages.

Current list of categories

Current list of categories:

• Category:Categories - category of categories view
• Special:Allpages - All Pages view (select Category in droplist)
• Special:Categories - one long flat list view

Adding a page to a category

In the page to be categorized, add the wikicode [[Category:NameOfCategory]]

Add multiple category tags to put the page in more than one category.

The result of catalog tags is showing a list of links to the categories that the page belongs to, shown at the bottom of the page.

Sub-categorizing (or Adding A Category to Another Category)

Simple: Edit the category's page and add the appropriate category tags (e.g. the Category:Drinks page is categorized under Category:Objects, and so "Drinks" as a sub-category shows up under the "Objects" category (which itself is under the Categories category).

Creating a new category

Creating a new category is simple. Just append the wikicode [[Category:NewCategoryName]] in the page to be categorized. If the category does not already exist, the wiki system automatically brings it into existence.

Linking directly to a category's list

The usual wikicode to link to an internal wiki page would give [[Category:Categories]]. Unfortunately, the '[[Category:' triggers the wiki system's automatic categorization features by eliminating the link in place, adding the categories list to the bottom of the page, and adding the page to the category. Avoid this effect by directing the link to refer from the main namespace, as [[:Category:Categories]]. The link is still a valid wiki link, goes to the correct place, and the automatic categorization function is suppressed.

Recap/summary: Categories

Images

Recap/summary: Images

Templates

This one's a doozy... hey, is that a demonic duck of some sort?!!

Current list of templates

Special:Allpages - select Templates from the droplist.

Recap/summary: Templates

um... *points* yarn ball!