Help:Contents

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See also Editing Help

How to use the DevelopSpace.net wiki

A wiki provides a quick and easy way for a group of users to create and edit web-based content. A number of different wiki software platforms exist - the one we're using is MediaWiki, based on the same software used by Wikipedia.

You can navigate within the wiki as you would any webpage. The power comes in your ability to make changes to and add documents. An in-depth discussion is available at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing -- the following are a few of the highlights.

To be able to create or edit pages, you'll first need to create an account by clicking on "log in / create account" link at the top right of the page and then selecting the "Create an account" link.

Once you have an account with a confirmed email address, you'll be able to edit existing pages. New users have to wait a period of time before being able to create new pages or upload files in order to limit wiki spam -- if you would like to get going right away, send us an email and we can expedite the process for your account.

To edit a page, navigate to that page and click the "edit" button at the top of the page. You will now see the "source" of the page you were looking at. For the most part, the source will be plain text, although there are some special tags that have particular meanings.


[[ ]] -- double square brackets are some of the most important special tags. The text in between the brackets identifies a wiki page to link to. If the page you specified doesn't yet exist, it will be created, so this is also the way you add pages.

For example, [[Main_Page]] will link to the main page of the wiki as follows Main_Page.

You can also add a pipe character, "|", between the page name and a description you'd like to see displayed. So, [[Main_Page|click here for the main page]] will link to the main page of the wiki as follows click here for the main page.


[ ] -- single square brackets work in a similar way to the double brackets but are for links outside of this website (i.e., somewhere else on the web. You should put the URL followed by any description you'd like to have appear on the page (rather than displaying the URL.)


We also support "interwiki" links, which allow you to link to a select set of external sites using a shortcut in a similar fashion to internal links. For example [[svn:minmars]] shows up as svn:minmars with a link to the MinMars project's Subversion repository. See the Interwiki page for more details and available shortcuts.


While you're editing a page, there are also a number of icons at the top of the text area for a variety of formatting commands. These buttons should be self-explanatory and will insert additional special tags into the wiki source.


When you're done editing, add description of the change in the summary line and save the page. A revision history is maintained of all of the changes to each page.


You'll notice there are of special links at the left hand side of each wiki page. The "recent changes" link in particular can be useful to get a quick glance at what's happened here since you last visited.