Create an Article
Creating an article in a wiki is as simple as clicking on a button and adding some text. A wiki assumes that whenever someone searches for an article and no results are found or clicks on a link to an article that doesn’t exist, that someone will want to create that information for the community.
Let’s use a Cookbook wiki example to explain ...
A set of breakfast recipes is not complete without an inspired Peanut Butter Sandwich. You have such a recipe. To add this recipe, the first thing you would do is use the Create or Find a Page search tool in the sidebar to see if someone already added a recipe with the same title. You search for Peanut Butter Sandwich. The wiki checks all existing articles and comes up empty. The wiki then gives you the opportunity to create an article titled Peanut Butter Sandwich by clicking the Edit link. Once you click edit, the article is instantly created and you can share your gooey peanut butter masterpiece with the world.
While editing your Peanut Butter Sandwich recipe you remember that nothing goes with such a delicacy better than a mug of your special hot chocolate. The easiest way to create an article for your hot chocolate recipe is to create a link for it using wiki syntax, a markup very similar to pMCode. But instead of using a single bracket, you’ll use double brackets. To create a link for your hot chocolate recipe you’d do something like this:
A mug of [[hot chocolate]] goes great with this sandwich.
Which would display this:
A mug of hot chocolate goes great with this sandwich.
When you click the hot chocolate link, the wiki discovers that the article doesn’t exist and then gives you the opportunity to create it by clicking the edit link. If the hot chocolate article already existed then this method would automatically link to it.
You can do a lot more with Wiki Syntax, please see the Wiki: Formating Text section for details.
Organizing Articles with Categories
Assigning an article to a category is easily accomplished with wiki syntax. For example, to add your Peanut Butter Sandwich to the sandwiches category you would click on the edit link to enter the article’s edit mode and add the following anywhere in the article:
[[Category:Sandwiches]]
This would automatically assign the article to the Sandwiches category. If the category doesn’t exist, the wiki will create it automatically. To add multiple categories just add an additional category like so:
[[Category:Sandwiches]]<br />
[[Category:Peanut Butter]]
This would assign the article to the Sandwiches and Peanut Butter categories. And finally, you can add sub-categories. For example, let’s say you want to create a “breakfast” sub-category for the main (also called “parent") Sandwiches category. The following would do that:
[[Category:Sandwiches::Breakfast]]
Now the article is assigned to the Sandwiches parent category and the Breakfast sub-category.
You can do a lot more with Wiki Syntax, please see the Wiki: Formating Text section for details.
