Using the website
This website is a wiki
Wikipedia defines a wiki as "a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project and could be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base".
Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in Portland, Oregon, in 1994... Cunningham says his goals were to link together people's experiences to create a new literature to document programming patterns, and to harness people's natural desire to talk and tell stories with a technology that would feel comfortable to those not used to "authoring".[1]
wikimoma.art is powered by the MediaWiki wiki engine, and here is a link to MediaWiki's Help contents if you want to jump right in to details on specific tasks. We will, however, go on to give an introduction to using this particular wiki below.
A really good video
If you are very new to wiki's, this short video Wiki in Plain English gives a great explanation of what they are and how they work.
"Wikis are generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them."
A bit of a hybrid
This wiki is a lot more structured than a traditional wiki and it is currently moderated; but because the idea is to have it open and to let it grow (and because it is a website powered by a wiki engine), it is still a wiki.
Different permissions
At wikimoma.art only users who are logged in can edit or create pages, and upload files. If you want to contribute, first create an account. Anyone who is not logged in can see most pages. Not all pages can be edited by everyone, if you have permission to edit a page you will see an edit option under the "Actions" menu (appearing in the top right hand corner of every page).
You can protect a page that you do not want others to edit, there would need to be a good reason to do this.
Talk page
As you can see in the menu above, each page has a Discussion page associated with it, this can be used to discuss the content and collaboration regarding that particular page.
Visual and Source editing
There are two ways to edit pages.
- The visual editor works much like a word processor and gives you a WYSIWYG approach (what you see is what you get).
- Source editing lets you use either wikitext or HTML5 mark up languages to mark up the wiki page.
As you can see in the image above, MediaWiki syntax was used to make a link of "tea" by typing two square brackets around the word. Similarly, in the next paragraph the word "nothing" was rendered bold by typing 3 apostrophes on each side of it.
MediaWiki syntax (previously known as WikiText) is easy to learn for those who like to do some simple coding. Here's link to MediWiki's "formatting" page if you'd like to learn it. Otherwise visual editing is straight forward enough - this is a default an can be achieved by simply selecting "edit" (rather than "edit source") from the Actions menu.
Work in progress
This page needs to be edited.