Wiki

The wiki is a set of community-editable pages written in wiki markup. Every page keeps a full revision history, can carry comments and file attachments, and can be tagged. The site wiki lives at /wiki; groups get their own wiki under /groups/<group>/wiki. This chapter covers the administrator's side; the Hub users book covers writing and editing pages.

Whether your hub needs it

The wiki is for the document that several people maintain and nobody owns — a protocol, a parameter table, a page of conventions that drifts as the work drifts. Its distinguishing feature is the revision history: every save is kept, you can see who changed what, and you can put back the version from before somebody's well-meant rewrite. Nothing else in this section can do that.

The typical case: a lab on the hub runs an instrument and keeps a page of settings that three postdocs edit between them. Any one of them can fix a number; if one of them fixes it wrongly, the history says so and the previous revision is one click away.

Against its siblings:

• Better than the Knowledge base at anything more than one person keeps up to date, because members edit it without an administrator account and every edit is recoverable. Worse at policy: a page any logged-in member may edit is not where the hub's rules should live, and there is no approval step on an ordinary wiki page — a save is live immediately.
• Better than the Forum at conclusions; worse at reaching them. A wiki page shows the current state and hides the argument that got there.
• The group wikis are where most hubs' wiki activity happens. The site wiki at /wiki is a public space any member may edit; a group wiki is bounded by the group's membership, which is what most people actually want.

What it is not: it is not a plain editor. Pages are written in wiki markup, which members have to learn, and a hub that switches on the Markdown parser instead changes the syntax for every page on the hub at once — see the note under Plugins.

If nobody has asked for a wiki, the site wiki is worth leaving off and the group wikis worth leaving to the groups that want them. An unwatched public-edit wiki is the component on a hub most likely to fill with spam.

Open it in the administrator interface under Components > Wiki. Two sub-menu links sit at the top left: Wiki Pages, the list below, and Plugins, which opens the Plugins manager filtered to the wiki folder. The Plugins link appears only if you may manage plugins.

Wiki Pages

The list shows every page in every wiki — site and group alike. Columns are ID, Title (with the page's path underneath, prefixed by /wiki/), Mode, State, Locked, Scope, Revisions, and Comments. Click a sortable column heading to sort by it; click again to reverse. Mode is not sortable.

The Revisions and Comments cells are links: they open the revisions or comments screen for that page.

Above the list are three filters:

• Search — matched against page titles only, then Go. Clear resets it.
• Scope — a scope:scope_id pair, such as site:0 or group:42.
• Namespace — anything before a colon in a pagename. Shipped namespaces include help, template, and special.

The toolbar offers Options (component configuration, shown only to users with the Configure permission), New, Edit, Delete, and Help. Delete asks for confirmation on a separate screen and is permanent — it removes the page's revisions, comments, attachments, and tags with it.

Clicking a page's State or Locked icon is not the same thing. State toggles between published and unpublished; the Locked column reflects the page's protected flag and is display-only in this list.

Creating or editing a page

Details

Field	Notes
Title	Required. Shown as the page heading.
Pagename	Required. The identifier used in URLs. Letters, numbers, and colons only; anything before a colon becomes the page's namespace. Left blank on a new page, it is generated from the title. special:, image:, and file: are reserved and rejected.
Path	The parent path for a sub-page, for example ParentPage.
Scope	site for the main wiki, group for a group wiki.
Scope ID	0 for the site wiki, or the group's ID for a group wiki.
Authors	A comma-separated list of usernames. Meaningful in Knol mode, where these users hold edit rights and are listed on the page.
Tags	Optional, comma-separated.

A panel beside the form shows the page's ID, Created date, Creator, Hits, and its number of Revisions. The values are read only; there is no reset-hits button on this form.

Parameters

Field	Notes
Mode	Wiki — any logged-in user may edit. Knol — only the listed authors may edit, and the author list is shown on the page. Static — the page renders without the wiki tabs and chrome, using the full content area.
Hide author list	Suppresses the author byline on a Knol page.
Allow other users to submit suggested changes	On a Knol page, lets non-authors save revisions that stay unapproved until someone approves them.
Allow other users to post comments	Enables the comment thread on a Knol page.
State	Unpublished, Published, or Trashed. Only published pages are reachable on the site.
Access Level	Which viewing level a visitor needs. Enforced on site-scope pages; group pages use the group's own membership rules instead.

Press Save to save and stay, Save & Close to return to the list, or Cancel to discard.

Revisions

The revisions screen opens from a page's Revisions link. A summary table at the top repeats the page's title, scope, ID, pagename, and path. Below it, a search box filters revisions by the text of the revision, and the list shows ID, Revision number, Edit Summary, Approved, Minor edit, Created, and Creator. Click the Approved icon to flip a revision between approved and not approved.

Only approved revisions are shown to readers. Approving a revision makes it the page's current version and un-approves whichever revision held that place before. The toolbar has New, Edit, Delete, and Help.

The edit form carries Edit summary and Text, with Minor edit and a State of Not approved, Approved, or Trashed in the parameters panel. Page title, pagename, scope, page ID, revision ID, revision number, creator, and created date are shown for reference and submitted unchanged.

Putting back a page somebody broke

Following the instrument-settings example: a postdoc has overwritten the page with something wrong and the lab wants yesterday's version back. This is the job the wiki exists for, and the whole of it happens on the revisions screen.

1. Go to Components > Wiki. Filter Scope to the group's group:<id> if it is a group page, and find the page by title.
2. Click the number in the page's Revisions column.
3. Read down the list. Created and Creator say who saved what and when; Edit Summary says why, when the editor bothered to write one. The revision currently carrying the Approved mark is the one readers see.
4. Click the Approved icon on the revision you want back. That revision becomes the page's current version and the one that held the place before it is un-approved.
5. Reload the page on the site to confirm.

Nothing is destroyed by this. The bad revision is still in the list, un-approved, and you can approve it again if you have picked the wrong one. That makes step 4 one of the safest things in this book.

Comments

The comments screen opens from a page's Comments link. It lists ID, Comment (truncated to 90 characters and linked to the edit form), Creator, Anonymous, State, and Created. Replies are shown indented under the comment they answer. The toolbar has Delete, Edit, New, and Help, and a search box filters by comment text.

The edit form has just two fields: an Anonymous checkbox and the required content body. Creator, created date, and the page are shown for reference.

Plugins

The wiki depends on plugins in the wiki folder, reachable from the Plugins sub-menu link:

• Parser - Default — the Trac-style wiki markup parser, the macro library, and the LaTeX formula renderer.
• Parser - Markdown — Markdown instead of wiki markup.
• Editor Toolbar and Editor WYKIWYG — the buttons above the page text box in the site editor.

Options

The Options button opens the component-wide configuration: the subpage separator, the default main page name, the maximum pagename length, whether comments and comment ratings are allowed, where an automatic table of contents is placed and how many headings trigger it, the upload paths for attachments, math images, and temporary files, and page caching with its lifetime. Every option is listed with its values in the configuration reference.

A group manager can override the automatic table-of-contents mode and heading threshold for that group's wiki from Wiki Settings in the group's wiki area.

Most of these are set-and-forget and the shipped values are reasonable. Two deserve a look. The upload paths for attachments, maths images, and temporary files should be left alone unless you are moving storage: changing one does not move the files already there, so existing attachments stop resolving. And page caching trades freshness for speed — with it on, an edit does not appear until the cached copy expires, which on a wiki people are actively editing looks like the save failing. It ships off, and on a small hub it should stay off.

Permissions

The Permissions tab sets who may configure, manage, create, delete, edit, change the state of, and edit their own wiki content, both for the component as a whole and for the page section. On a site-scope wiki page in standard Wiki mode, editing requires core.edit, or core.edit.own if you created the page; deleting requires core.delete; and anyone holding core.manage gets full rights over every page. Group wiki pages defer to the group's membership and manager roles instead.

API

The wiki exposes create, read, update, delete, and list endpoints under /api/wiki; see the API reference.