What is a Wiki?

The term Wiki is a shortened form of WikiWikiWeb. A Wiki
is a database of pages that can be collaboritively edited using a web
browser.

Here are some important wiki features:

• Editability by anyone - A wiki page is editable by anyone with a web browser
  
• ability to view recent changes
  
• ability to search pages (several ways)
  
• ability to very easily add new pages
  
• ability to see the change history for a document
  
• ability to add new information or modify existing information
  

How does this compare to other collaboration tools, like Notes?

A Wiki can accomplish certain things very easily, but there are
some things it cannot do. The biggest missing
feature is some kind of access control, to allow only certain groups
to see and manipulate informatin.

This is an important question. In general, wiki's have
NO security. (That's right!) Because of this, the
possibility exists for accidental or conscious destruction or corruption
of part of all of the wiki.

There are two main ways to devalue a wiki. One is through erasure
and the other is through corruption. Dealing with erasure is not terribly
difficult, because there is a change log (and back versions) of every page
maintained in a location inaccessible to web users. Thus, when page
deletions or major content erasures are detected (which should be fairly
quickly), pages can be restored quite easily to their previous good state.

Explicit and intentional
corruption is more difficult to deal with. The possibility exists that someone
can enter incorrect information onto a page, or edit pages to intentionally
change the information so it is incorrect (for example, people can change
the attributions on a page to make it look like a different person made a
particular comment, or someone can change the content of a paragraph to
alter its meaning in a detrimental way). Pretty much any collaborative system
has this problem. A Wiki is just more wide open to it, since it lacks
any security at all. In practice, wiki corruption is an extremely rare
event, and one that could be dealt with (if needed) with a notification
feature (to a fixed auditor) for new material submission.

In other words, the philosophy of wiki is one of dealing manually with the
rare (exception) case of a saboteur, rather than designing in features
and overhead (both in implementation and in usage) to avoid the damage
caused by a saboteur.

Finding and accessing information in the wiki

How can I search the wiki?

There are already more ways to search and/or scan the wiki than you
can "shake a stick at":

How do I see what's been going on recently in the wiki?

Not very many. It helps to keep certain types of information
formatted in a consistent way. One important
convention that will help with consistency is the use of "Template"
pages.

A. If the content already exists on a web site, then just add
a link to a wiki page. Follow these steps:

You can include a url to the image in the page. Example:

http://www.lineo.com/images/products/uclinux/logo_small.gif 

If they are significant, or you want people to know that you made them,
then yes. Just put your name or email address after your comment. It is
not uncommon to indent your comment under the statement your are commenting
on. Also, it helps to italicize your comment to make it stand off
from the main body of the page you are commenting on.

However, in some cases it may be appropriate to just make your change
anonymously. Correcting spelling, formatting, or trivial word changes
are some examples where it is not necessary (and even discouraged) for
you to sign your modification.

Can I add HTML to the wiki?

A. If you want to add a single line of HTML, use the HTML macro.
This is done by putting your html text as a parameter to the
HTML macro, like so:

[[HTML(<font size=+12>This is large font</font>)]]

This would show up on the page as:
This is large font

It's also possible to place an html document into a page by adding
#format html as the first line in the page. If that line is there then the whole
page will be interpreted as HTML (thus making links to other pages
becomes a bit more difficult!) Make sure that you only add the body
portion of the page (not the HTML headers or anything else outside
of the body, including the <BODY> tag itself).

All of this only works if the HTML extensions (HTML macro and parser) are installed.

Installation & Configuration

Why is the "diff" feature not working?

Diffs need two things to work properly:

• The directory "datadir/backup" must exist.
  
• You need a GNU diff executable in your webserver's PATH. Note that the PATH of your webserver might be much shorter than the PATH you are used to from your shell.
  

How do I administer the wiki?

Not directly. It's easy to do (if you have permissions where
the actual wiki data files are kept. But usually, you must
request the wiki administrator to restore the page for you.
This is done as a hedge against the
improbable case of someone trying to sabotage the wiki.

For people reading this FAQ page (which is probably not your average attacker), there is this way to restore a page:

1. click on the little "i" in the top-right corner (PageInfo).
   
2. click on "view" of the version you want to restore.
   
3. in the "Location" bar of your browser, replace "action=recall" with "action=raw".
   
4. Cut&paste the text into the edit box of that page, after clicking "EditPage".
   

How do I create a new Template page?

Templates are pages that show up automatically as options when you
create a blank page. Any page that ends in the word Template will
automatically show up in the list. Hence, if you want certain
types of pages to have a similar format (similar headings, organization,
etc.), you just define a page that ends in Template, and when creating
pages of this type, select that template and edit it. The wiki
fills in the starting content for you. Templates are editable wiki
pages like any other.

To create a Template page, just create a new page called <something>Template