Help:Contents

Do you need some help with this wiki?

Getting an Account

Any existing user in the AccountAdmin group can provide an account. Contact one of them and provide a desired username. Nominally, user names are formed via your "FirstLast" names.

General MediaWiki Help

• MediaWiki User's Guide
• Formatting text (markup)
• MediaWiki FAQ
• Reference card (printable "cheat sheet")

Why and how we are using Mediawiki

• Reasons for Mediawiki

Local Customization

This wiki has some facilities specific to its topic using standard MediaWiki features called "templates" as well as "Semantic" extensions to MediaWiki.

Templates

A number of templates are used to simplify some things like linking to DocDB, calendars, etc. Each template is written as it's own page and should provide examples of use. Some generally useful ones are:

• Template:DocDB
• Template:Redmine

Semantic MediaWiki Extensions

Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) extensions provide ways to turn a wiki into a structured database but one that can be "programmed" by non programmers.

• Introduction to SMW
• Specific help for using SMW in this wiki

General Tips

Some general guidance on how to edit this wiki effectively

• Keep individual pages sucinct if they are meant to be high-level. Inestead of being verbose in a section of a page, consider making a new page to hold the content and leaving a link.
• Use "categories" to tag pages. Do this by adding [[Category:Category Name]] somewhere in the page, usually at the bottom is best. Try picking an existing category name or make up a new one if none fit. Multiple category tags may be placed in a page.

Expert Level Tips

If you edit this wiki frequently there are some tools that may assist you:

• WikipediaFS is FUSE module to can be used to mount this wiki on to your local file system. Each topic becomes a simple text file which you can edit.
• MediaWiki Emacs mode allows you to edit a topic in Emacs. Emacs will handle connecting to the wiki. In modern Emadsen it is installable via M-x package-list-packages