Help:Basic Guide to the AIUK Wiki

From AIUK Wiki

The intention of this quick start guide is to show you how easy it is to edit the AIUK wiki. If, after reading this guide and the help pages you are still confused and need some guidance you should contact the Wiki Administrator or one of the Wiki Supervisors. The software that this wiki uses is MediaWiki and is the same that Wikipedia runs on, so if you've ever looked through wikipedia you should be able to grasp the concepts fairly quickly.

Login in to AIUK

To edit the wiki you need to be a member of AIUK. You also need to be logged in to the website.

Make Yourself Familiar with the "Markup"

Once you have logged in you will need to take a quick look at the basics of how to edit the wiki. We already have a full set of help pages for editing the wiki and they can be found here. At this stage you will probably want to familiarise your self with the basics of "wiki markup". In short this "markup" is a set of special characters that are used to change the formatting of text within a wiki page. A list of the markup characters that you can use can be found here. You should refer to that page when you want to change the formatting of your text.

Finding an Existing Page

To find a page that has already been created in the wiki you can use the search function. This can be found in the menu bar on the left hand side of the page. If a page has already been written that contains the search terms you used you will be able to see it listed.

Editing an Existing Page

To edit an existing page you should click on the edit tab that can be found at the top of the page (above the content of the wiki page but below the main AIUK menu). Clicking on this will take you to another page that has an editable text box below the content of the page. To make changes to the wiki page you should edit the text in this box. Once you have made your changes you can preview your work by clicking on the Show preview button below the text box. You can also save your work by clicking on the Save page button. You should also put a short summary of your edit into the Summary text box - this will let people see why the page was changed at a glance.

How to Make a New Page

If you cannot find the page you are looking for by using the search function you might want to create a new page. The quickest way to do this is to type the full title of your page into the search function. This will then bring up a page that says There is no page titled "...". You can create this page. To create you new page you should click on create this page which will take you to a page with an empty text box. Enter your content and save the page as outlined above.

Other Stuff

• Don't be afraid to make changes - just dive right in. If you make a mistake or trash a page don't worry! All pages can be reverted to previous states by one of the Wiki Supervisors.
• Any member of AIUK can edit the wiki so don't be surprised if your contributions are edited.
• Remember to fill in the summary field and you can tick the 'minor edit' box to indicate that you only made some small changes to a page.
• Each wiki page can have an associated discussion thread on AIUK. To discuss the content of a page just click on the discussion tab at the top of the page and you will be taken to the discussion thread (or a new one will be opened).