Wiki

Overview
Creating a first wiki page
Creating further wiki pages
Viewing and navigating between pages
Editing your pages
Formatting your page
Linking to another wiki page
Linking to external web pages
What happens if someone else is changing the page at the same time?
Adding images and attachments
Saving and/or printing a wiki page
Viewing page information
Viewing page history and page changes
The Recent Changes list
Creating an automatic index
Removing wiki pages
Searching for content
Setting Permissions
Changing the default page

Additional materials

Open a pdf document containing step-by-step instructions with screen shots

Overview

What is a Wiki?

A Wiki is a tool for people with no technical knowledge to change and create web pages. Wiki was designed specifically for researchers and lecturers to collaborate on documents, share information and create teaching materials. The Wiki tool used in Interact was designed and developed at the Centre for Applied Research into Educational Technology (CARET) at Cambridge University. (Back to top)

Creating a first wiki page

When you first click on the Wiki tool, if there is no existing content, you will see a default page. (See Changing the default page for details regarding customising the default page.)
To edit (or create) the contents of a page:

click the Edit button at the top of the page
delete all words within the text box
add your own text, using the text editor to perform simple formatting tasks
to preview your changes before you save them, select Preview at the bottom of the page
to cancel without making changes, click Cancel
click Save to save changes; this first page will now be the Home page for your site. (Back to top)

Creating further wiki pages

To create any new page, first create a link to it from an existing page by editing the page. To do this, once in Edit mode, type the new page name in square brackets. For example, if you do not already have a page called 'page 2', typing '[page 2]' will create a new, empty page called 'page 2'. When you save your changes, the link you have just created will appear with a question mark next to it: page 2? The question mark shows that the Wiki page contains a link to a new page that has not had any content added yet. Clicking on this link takes you to the new page. The first time you go to your new page, you will see the following:

Select the ‘Edit’ button at the top of the page to delete this pre-existing text and add content, preview, and save changes in the normal way. (See Changing the default page for details regarding customising the default page.)

Note: You can't use the following characters in the name of a Wiki page as they all are used for other reasons:

: Colon

@ At

# Hash

| Pipe

\ Back-Slash

(Back to top)

Viewing and navigating between pages

The Wiki tool does not have a separate menu to navigate through the pages. To move from page to page, follow the links within each page. Links with an "arrow icon" beside them link to external websites or to file attachments.

You can use the “Home” icon at the top of the page to return to the Wiki Home page for your site, at any time. If you can’t find the page you are looking for, you can search for it using the Search box. Another option is to create an index of your wiki pages. See Creating an automatic index for further information on how to do this.

As you navigate around the wiki, your breadcrumb trail will appear at the top of the page just below the various standard icons. (A breadcrumb trail lists the pages that you have visited, in order). You can use this to return to any page at any time by clicking on the name of the page you want to go to. (Back to top)

Editing your pages

To edit the contents of a page, select the 'Edit' button at the top of the page. Make your changes in the text box. Then select the 'Save' button at the top of the page. Your changes will appear in the wiki page for everyone to see.

If you receive a message Permission Denied when you try to edit a page, you do not have permission to update pages. If you think this is a mistake, you will need to talk to your site administrator to change this.
(Back to top)

Formatting your page

When you edit the page, you will see a 'cheat sheet' displayed on the page to the right. This gives you a brief introduction to the codes used for text formatting in Wiki. The 'cheat sheet' links to a full help page. Use this help page to get full information on text formatting, including superscripts, different sorts of lists, etc. Simple formatting features such as bold, italics, heading size, etc can be found at the top of the text editing window.

Some useful formatting tips include:

Bulleted and numbered lists:

Prefixing all the items in a list with * or - creates a bulleted list.
Prefixing all the items with # creates a numbered list.
Prefixing with A. (or a.) creates an uppercase (or lowercase) enumerated list.
To indent items in a list, you can combine the different bullet formatting codes next to each other, as shown above.
Note: in all cases there needs to be a space before the first word of the list item.

To change colour of text enter the following code while in Edit mode

{color:red}Some text{color}
Changes the colour of the text between the brackets to red (note the US spelling!)

To change background colour behind text enter the following code while in Edit mode

{bgcolor:yellow}Some text{bgcolor}
Highlights in yellow the text between the brackets (note US spelling!) (Back to top)

Linking to another wiki page

To add a link to another Wiki page, type the name of that page within square brackets. For example, typing '[page 2]' will link to a page called 'page 2'.

If you accidentally delete something that you didn't want to, this is not a problem. See the page history for more details. (Back to top)

Linking to external web pages

To add a link to an external web page, type the full URL including 'http://'. For example, 'http://www.abc.net.au'. External links will open in a new window.

You may wish to change the text of the link to make it more obvious what it is. To do this, use the code shown below and add the words you would like to appear as the link between the colon and the vertical line (also known as a pipe), as follows:

{link:ABC website|http://www.abc.net.au}
(Back to top)

What happens if someone else is changing the page at the same time?

If someone else has edited and saved the page while you have been editing it, you will see a message to say that the page has altered, and their new page will be displayed above yours. You can then decide to overwrite their changes (using the 'overwrite' button) or to keep their changes (using the 'save' button).
(Back to top)

Adding images and attachments

Adding images

Before you add an image, make sure that it is the correct size and shape for your web page, and that the file size is optimised for the web. If you put an image with a very large file size into a wiki page, it will take a long time for users to download it. Many painting programs will allow you to compress images for the web.

To add an image, select the Edit button to edit the page. Then select the 'Image' button. This will take you to your Resources folder. You can either click Select to select an existing image on your worksite or click Add new to upload a new image from your computer. When you have chosen your image, click Finish.Your image will be inserted into your page.

If you update the image in Resources, your image in Wiki will automatically be updated too.

To position an image to the left or the right of the page so that text flows around it:

1. Click the ‘Edit' button on the page.
2. Find the image code in the editing box. It will be similar to this:
{image:worksite:/bear.png|bear.png}
3. Edit it to include the following additional text:
{image:worksite:/bear.png|bear.png |ext|float-left } or {image:worksite:/bear.png|bear.png |ext|float-right }
4. Click the ‘Save' or ‘Preview' buttons to see your image within the page.

Adding attachments

Select the 'Edit' button to edit the page and place the cursor at the position on the page where you want the file to be attached.
Then select the 'Link' button from the editing toolbar. This will take you to your Resources folder.
You can either click 'Select' to attach an existing resource on your worksite or click 'Add new' to attach a new resource from your computer.
When you have selected your file, click the ‘Continue’ button at the bottom of the page.
You will see code similar to the following appear in your editing box:
{link:myfile.doc|worksite:/myfile. doc}.( In this case, the file was called ‘myfile.doc)
Click on Preview to see how this looks, and Save it if you’re happy with it.
You may wish to change the text of the link to make it more obvious what it is. To do this, use the code shown below and add the words you would like to appear as the link between the colon and the vertical line (also known as a pipe), as follows: {link:My poem|worksite:/myfile. doc}
Click the ‘Save’ or ‘Preview’ buttons to see your file attached to the page.

Attachments are stored in Resources but in project sites you don't need to have the Resources tool enabled to add attachments. You can link to any sort of resource that you create in Resources so, any type of file you upload, or an HTML file or text file you create.

If you update the file in Resources, your attachment will automatically be updated too.

Note: Staff have a responsibility to familiarise themselves with guidelines on appropriate copyright compliance relating to the use of resources attached to wiki pages. See http://www.csu.edu.au/copyright/information/interact-staff-guide.pdf for more information.

An extensive set of resources relating to copyright issues for staff and students can be found at http://www.csu.edu.au/copyright/

(Back to top)

Saving and/or printing a wiki page

To save or print a wiki page, follow these steps:

Select 'Info' option from the menu at the top of the page that you wish to save or print
Scroll down to Feeds
There are three options for saving or printing the page:

Note: Clicking on the Public view option opens the page in a browser window - advertise this URL to allow non-site members to view the page. (Back to top)

Viewing page information

To get the information on any page, select the 'Info' option from the menu. This gives you the following information:

Lists all pages the page links to
Lists all pages that link to this page
Gives the page owner (usually the person who created it)
Gives the global page name, to allow linking to it from outside the Wiki
Gives the page permission details (the site you need to be a member of to see it)
Gives details of when the page was last edited

'Info' also allows you to open the following versions of the page:
• Printer friendly version
• Un-editable HTML version
• An open document format (.odf) version (which can be opened in Open Office, for example)
• An RSS feed of recent changes (see the News tool Help for information on how to use an RSS feed.) (Back to top)

Viewing page history and page changes

The Wiki tool has a “History” function that records all the changes made and allows you to revert back to a previous version of your page. When editing, if you accidentally delete information, it is possible to get it back. To get the history of any page, select the 'History' option from the menu. This gives you the following options:

Gives a list of all previous versions of that page, with the name of the user who altered it and the date.
Allows you to view any previous version.
Compare the contents of any version with the current version - additions and deletions between versions are colour-coded.
Compare the contents of any version with the version immediately previous, to see what changes were made by each user.
Allows you to revert to any previous version.

If you have accidentally deleted content from your page, you can use the 'revert to this version' option to revert to an earlier, correct version, for example. (Back to top)

The Recent Changes list

To create an automatically updated list of the recently changed pages in your wiki, you can use the recent-changes macro. To do this, type {recent-changes} (with the curly brackets) into any page.

In page view, you will see a list of the recently changed pages in your Wiki, together with the name of the person who last changed the page and the date and time of the change. If a lot of pages have changed recently, this may be a bit slow! By default, it shows all the pages changed in the last 30 days. To change the time and date limits for page display, include a time / date setting using the following examples:

• {recent-changes:12h} - changed pages in the last 12 hours.
• {recent-changes:7d} - changed pages in the last 7 days.
• {recent-changes:2008-6-30} - changed pages since 30 June, 2008 (Back to top)

Creating an automatic index

To do this, simply select ‘Edit’ and type {index} (including the curly brackets) in the editing window. By choosing ‘Preview’ you can see a complete set of the pages in your wiki with clickable links to take you to the page you want. You can either save the index for further use, or simply move to the page you want from the ‘Preview’ in which case the index will disappear.(Back to top)

Removing wiki pages

It's not possible to actually delete a wiki page once it has been create because a record is kept of all previous versions of a wiki page as described in History. However, to give the effect of deleting a wiki page, edit it and delete all the text so that the page is empty. You can then delete any links to it from other pages. Click the ‘Info' button on a page to see which pages link to it. (Back to top)

Searching for content

To search for content, type your search term in the search box and press 'return'. All pages on that wiki site containing your search terms will be listed. Don't forget that pages which are not in the wiki will not be searched. This includes other Interact pages and attachments to the wiki. This search will be recorded in your breadcrumb trail and you can return to your results page at any time.

Wiki will recognise the 'and' operator but not 'not' or 'or'. For example, searching for 'children and dahlias' will find pages which contain both the word 'children' and the word 'dahlias' but not pages which contain one of the words but not both. (Back to top)

Setting Permissions

Wiki has two levels of permissions at site level and at page level. Permissions for the Wiki tool can be viewed by clicking on the Info link on any wiki page. The default page level Subject site permission settings for the Wiki tool are as shown below. These can only be altered by a site member who has appropriate permissions.

Site level permissions are the default permissions for all pages. However, permissions can be changed for individual pages. For example, you can alter permissions so that wiki is editable by everyone, apart from one page which can only be edited by maintainers.

There are 5 levels of permission within Wiki:

Wiki read (read pages)
Wiki create (create new pages; update must be enabled to allow this)
Wiki update (edit pages)
Wiki admin (alter site permissions)
Wiki super-admin

Remember that permissions cascade downwards you cannot update a page if you cannot read it, so it makes no sense to enable 'update' but disenable 'read'. If you enabled 'create' or 'update', Wiki will assume that you want 'read' permission enabled as well.

CSU Interact roles are not automatically mapped to Wiki roles in order to allow the tool to be used in a more flexible way. We recommend the following ways of mapping CSU Interact permissions onto Wiki permissions.

Default - using Wiki as a traditional wiki tool

With these permissions, all users can edit the wiki. This would allow collaborative drafting of documents, for example. This is the default setting for permissions.

	Read	Create	Update	Admin	Super
Access	yes	yes	yes
Maintain	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes

Using Wiki as a simple content management system

With these permissions, only maintain users can edit the wiki. Access users can only read pages. This allows it to be used as a simple content management system.

	Read	Create	Update	Admin	Super
Access	yes
Maintain	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes

Page-level permissions

Page-level permissions apply to that page only. For example, you can alter permissions so that wiki is editable by everyone, apart from one page which can only be edited by maintainers.

To alter page-level permissions, select 'info'. Tick and un-tick the boxes below the permissions to alter the permissions settings. Because permissions cascade downwards, this may not always have the effect that you imagine. For example, if 'update' is enabled for a role, you cannot disenable 'read' for that role, because users must be able to read a page to update it.

The 'create' permission is not applicable to page-level permissions and can only be altered at site level.

Site-level permissions

Site-level permissions are the default permissions for all pages.

To alter site-level permissions, select 'Info' and then select 'edit site permissions' (as shown above). Tick and un-tick the boxes to switch permissions on and off. The default site-level Subject site permission settings for the Wiki tool are as shown below. These can only be altered by a site member who has appropriate permissions.

(Back to top)

Changing the default page

The “default_template” page is used as the template for each new page that you create. You can customize this page to suit your own needs. For example, you can include a structure for students creating their own project pages, or can remove all the text so that new pages are created empty.

To change the “default_template” page:

Find the page called “default_template” by using the wiki search tool.
Edit and save the “default_template” page as you would with any other Wiki page.
All new pages created from now on will have the text and layout set in your “default_template” page.

The “default_template” page also sets the permissions for your new pages. To find out more about this, see the wiki permissions section of this guide. (Back to top)