A wiki is a collection of web-based articles that can be updated by their readers. The most well-known example is
Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Wikis are very useful for:
- knowledge bases, ie. repositories of information for troubleshooting and how-tos
- keeping track of information that often needs to be changed, or appended to
- storing a bunch of articles that can easily cross-link to each other
The
Zines plug-in supports wikis as a special type of e-zine.
To start a wiki, simply create a new zine with type "wiki".
Wiki Indexes
When
you view a wiki, you will see a small input box that resembles a search
form, with a "goto" button. Enter a keyword or topic into this
box, and the wiki will display all related articles. It looks for
articles with the word(s) you typed in their title, so for certain
keywords, you might pull up several articles, or you might find none.
If
no articles are selected, or you have selected terms for which no
articles are found, the wiki will instead show its "default"
article. The default article has a name which is set to
"_start". If there is no such article, you will see nothing other
than the search box.
For new wikis, you should create a default
article by clicking on the new article button. Set it's title to
anything you like (eg. "Getting Started"), and set its name to
"_start". In the article body, you can introduce the wiki, and
provide some helpful cross-links to popular keywords.
Wiki Links
A
wiki link is a hotlink that jumps to a different keyword or term in the
wiki. Certain tagged words in the wiki articles will be turned
into wiki links—clicking on these links is the same as if you had typed
those words into the goto box.
Wiki links are very easy to
create - simply wrap the keyword(s) in double-parentheses, like this:
( (foo) ). This notation is automatically converted by
the Zines module to a proper hyperlink.
If no wiki articles are
found under the linked keyword(s), then a simple message is printed
which invites the user to create a new article. For this reason,
you can freely link to non-existent keywords, without having to worry
about broken links.
If you want to link to a keyword, but use
anchor text that is different from the keyword, then use this wikilink
format: ( (keyword|anchor text) ).
All displayed wiki link terms are summarized at the end of a Wiki Index as a helpful list of "related topics".
Growing the Wiki
The
main advantage of wikis is that they are easy to grow by any reader who
has some new information to contribute. There are three ways to
add information to a wiki:
- Edit an existing article.
This is the best method when correcting bad or old information.
Editing articles may be limited to administrator mode or to the author
of the original article, depending on local security settings.
- Add
a new article. This is good when creating completely new topics,
or extending an existing topic by adding a subtopic. To add a
subtopic, simply create a new article, but include the main topic
keyword in the title. For example, if there is an article on
"Puppies", you can add a subtopic titled "Puppies vs. Kittens".
If somebody looks for articles on "Puppies", they will get both
articles because both have the keyword in the title. But the
second article will also be found by someone looking for information on
"Kittens", which would not be the case if it were included in the main
"Puppies" article.
- Add a comment to the article. This
method is good when you do not necessarily have good information to
contribute, but have some suggestions, questions, or possibly
unreliable information to add to the discussion. Simply follow
the comment link to add your notes. Commenting works the same as
in any other e-zine or forum.
Wiki Security Rules
By
default, wikis are configured so that you must be a website member in
order to contribute to them. You can change these using the
following configuration settings:
wiki.article.policy = member
wiki.comment.policy = member
Change
"member" to "public", "admin" or some other policy setting to change
who is allowed to contribute articles or comments to the wiki.
If
you want to make the wiki readable only by members, then you should set
it's access to members-only in the e-zine configuration screen.