Editing the wiki

You're welcome to go ahead without reading this page: most of the core features should be accessible without instruction. Have fun & don't lose motivation!

Account

First make an account.

(We could make the wiki editable to people without an account, but that reveals IP addresses. Single sign-on would be nice though.)

Basic editing

Edit pages by clicking on the Edit tab or pencil icon, depending on whether you're on desktop or mobile. This will open the visual editor by default, it takes a second or two to load. Once it has, simply start typing, taking notice of the option top bar at the top.

Use appropriate headings to organize page content, starting with heading and going subsequently down the sub-headings if necessary.

We got all the formats, not just bold: italic, ^superscript, code, _subscript, ~~strikethrough,~~ underline, big and small.

Links. Wikis live from internal links, so-called wikilinks, so make sure to add them liberally to help people get where they want to go. Whether wikilink or external link, the process is the same: click the link icon, or ctrl + k or type[[ to get a pop-up search for other pages to link to.

Lists

create in top bar
- or type * on new line to start an unordered list
- or type 1. on new line to start an ordered list

Inserting stuff

The editor top bar has an Insert tab for various things. Inserting images and media proceeds through the graphical interface. Uploading can be done through the interface, or at any point using Special:Upload.

Note: due to a quirk in how media search works, it is strongly recommended to name things using whole words with spaces in between! E.g. idealized dishwasher stacking diagram .svg not idealDwStackDia.svg!
Wikimedia Commons has loads of images without any legal restrictions.

To insert templates, click the respective insert button, or type {{ to get a pop-up search and selecting one. For now there is only Template:Warning

Warning! ⚠️ Only one template right now!

Insert tables too :)
	pad	website	wiki
easy to edit	yes	no	yes
easy to find stuff	no	yes	yes
4 letters long	no	no	yes

Mermaid diagrams are enabled. These are 'coded' diagrams, you need to switch to the source editor and read some docs. {{#mermaid:flowchart TD;

A[chicken]==>B(Egg);
A-->Csubroutine;
B-- special relation -->D((circle));
C-->D;
click A "https://sandbox.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/A"
click B "https://sandbox.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/B"
click C "https://sandbox.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/C"
click D "https://sandbox.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/D"
style A fill:lightblue,stroke-width:1rem

}}

Creating pages

There is an intentional barrier to creating a page in order to prevent duplication. The easiest way to create a new page is to search for it: if it doesn't exist, you will see an option to create it. You can also access the create page dialogue by requesting the URL of the new page, e.g.: https://pommel.uber.space/wiki/new_page

Deleting a page currently requires Admin rights.

Advanced options

Clicking on the hamburger menu ☰ in the top bar show advanced options:

Options or Categories allows you to add categories to a page, which you can think of as (hash)tags: each category has an automatically generated page that lists all the pages tagged with that category, for example Category:Rooms.
Page settings allows you to redirect the current page to another page. This can be useful when you have different names for the same thing. For example, K20-1-4 redirects to Office
- a redirect is automatically created when you 'move' a page. 'Moving' a page is more easily thought of as renaming it.

Wiki-think

We're so used to hierarchical-folders-and-files that organizing information in any other way can take a bit of getting used to! Here you can think of there being "one folder" for all pages, which you can look at in Special:AllPages. In order to help people find their way between pages, wikilinks are the primary tool of choice. (There are many other special, automatically-generated pages in Special:SpecialPages which can assist the interlinking of pages: for example, Special:LonelyPages lists all pages which no other pages links to.)

Private pages

Wikipedia was made for total transparency: MediaWiki is not meant for storing sensitive data. Really, they are quite clear on that point. However, there are a bunch of extensions, one of the most popular called Lockdown. Since it's good enough for Dezentrale, it should be good enough for us. Note that "uploaded files (images, files, docs... ) will always remain readable via direct access by default."^[source]

With that warning in place, the way to make private pages is to prefix Private: to the page you're creating. E.g.: Private:DeathStar_Blueprints