Advanced Help
From UN-INSTRAW Wiki
This page delves deeper into usage of the wiki. There's no particular order here, so just jump to the topic you're interested in.
Contents |
Watchlist
A Watchlist is a list of pages you have special interest in, or are monitoring on the Wiki. The "my watchlist" link at the top of the page links to the watchlist. It will show recent edits to pages in your list.
At the top of each page, there is a "watch" tab. Click that to add the page to your Watch list.
Redirects
Moving a page will create a REDIRECT. The previous location of the page will be replaced with
#REDIRECT [[New Page Title]].
You can place this in any page, if you want to redirect.
If you click edit on a REDIRECTed page, the edit will be on the page you have redirected to.
Viewing a REDIRECTed page (such as Help:Contents) you'll notice a small message at the top (Redirected from How to Edit?). Clicking that, and you will be able to edit the redirect itself.
Special Pages
Administrative and helpful functions for the Wiki are listed under Special:Specialpages. Browse through and check them out.
User Contributions
To view wiki activity of a particular user, this is the url. Replace "Userlogin" in the url with the user name you wish to check. (The user name is case sensitive)
http://www.un-instraw.org/wiki/training/?title=Special:Co...
More on Style Instructions
Here's a few more instructions on styling text in the wiki.
A blank line in the Wiki text creates a blank line.
* at the beginning of a line creates a list.
<nowiki></nowiki> will stop Wiki text processing within its contents.
__TABLESEC__ is a processing instruction. It formats sections as a table. Most of the template pages use this.
__TOC__ will include the Table Of Contents in that spot, rather than at the top of the page.
History and Revisions
Each page has a "history" tab at the top. Click that, and you have access to all previous revisions of the page, facilities to view differences between revisions, and the ability to restore older revisions.
Each revision lists the time/date and author of the edit.
View differences between two revsions by selecting them with the "radio buttons", and clicking "Compare selected versions". The subsequent page shows side-by-side color coded differences in the two revisions.
Back on the "history" page, clicking the time/date will bring up a view of the revision. If you click "edit", and subsequently save, you will have restored the previous version.
Transclusion
With transclusions, wiki pages or portions of the wiki pages, can be reused throughout the site.
To transclude an entire page, use this wiki text. Note the ":". {{:Transcluded Page}}
More commonly here, only a section of the page is transcluded. The portion after "#" is the title of the section to transclude. {{:Transcluded Page#Section Title}}
Templates
When a new article is created, you encounter a dialog asking if you want to create a Blank Page, or use one of the templates.
MediaWiki:Noarticletext is the Wiki page the controls the content of the dialog.
The templates themselves are present, and editable as follows. Note all these pages are "protected" so that only Sysops can edit.
To add a new template, visit that page and click edit, and you will see some nasty looking Wiki text. Copy and paste one of the lines at the bottom,
* [{{SERVER}}{{localurl:{{NAMESPACE}}:{{PAGENAME}}|action=edit&starttext=NewInstitution|}} New Institution] : use this to enter a new institution
and replace "NewInstitution" and "New Institution" with the name of the new template ("NewTemplate", "New Template").
Then create a new page at MediaWiki:NewTemplate. Created it as a Blank Page, and fill with the default structure your require. Save the edit, and the template has been created. This page will automatically be protected and can only be edited by sysops.
Categories
Pages can be assigned to Categories. The templates all have preset Categories for their type (ie Institution, Training, Training Material, Spanish, French) and a Category to fill in for the relevant country.
Category tags look like.
[[Category:Institution]]
This will create a link to the Category page(s) at the bottom. The following page lists all pages within that Category. And that can be handy.
Categories are also used in Dynamic Pages, as described next.
Dynamic Pages
<DynamicPageList> category=Project namespace=0 transclude=essentials </DynamicPageList>
Technical Details
If you are looking to work with the code behind the wiki, read the Technical Details
Further Reading
MediaWiki Handbook has information on just about everything related to using, editing, and programming MediaWiki, with lots of links to further resources.