Wiki

The wiki is a set of pages a community writes together. Anyone can read them. Editing them takes a permission, and who has it differs between the hub's own wiki and a group's — see Who may edit. Every save keeps the old text, so nothing is ever lost. The hub's wiki is at https://<your hub>/wiki, and each group has its own wiki under the group's Wiki tab; see Groups.

A wiki is the right place for knowledge that changes and has no single owner. A thermal transport lab writes down how it prepares samples and calibrates the apparatus: the protocol is corrected every few months, three people maintain it, and every new student needs it on their first day. Kept in the group's wiki, it has one address, everyone in the group can fix it, and the history shows what changed when a result stops reproducing.

The wiki is not the other places you could put this

• A blog post is dated and stays as written. A wiki page is meant to be rewritten. See Blog.
• A project's files are private to the project team and are the work itself. A wiki page is the writing about the work. See Projects.
• A resource is a finished thing you are publishing to the whole hub, with authors and a citation. A wiki page is a living document. See Resources.

One consequence worth knowing before you commit to it: on a hub running Solr search, wiki pages are not in the search index, so the hub's main search box will not find the lab's protocol. Its readers reach it by link, by the wiki's own Search box, or by tag. See Search and Tags.

Who may edit

Reading is open to anyone who can see the page. Everything else depends on a permission, and this is the usual reason a member cannot find the Edit tab.

In a group wiki, any member of the group can create pages, and edit and delete unlocked ones. Group managers can do all of that plus edit locked pages. This is the arrangement the lab's protocol wants, and it is why most working documents live in a group wiki rather than the hub's — and why a group member should treat the Delete tab with care.

In the hub's wiki, creating and editing are hub-wide permissions an administrator grants. A bare install grants them to the hub's content-editing roles, not to every registered member, so on a hub whose administrator has not widened them, an ordinary member can read the site wiki and comment on it but cannot create or edit a page. If the Edit tab is not there, that is why; ask the hub's support team. See Support.

The Help: pages that ship with the wiki, and any page an administrator has locked, are editable only by wiki managers in both cases.

Finding your way around

A wiki page's address is its page name: https://<your hub>/wiki/MyPageName. Sub-pages add path segments: .../wiki/ParentPage/ChildPage.

The sidebar beside every page holds a Search box for this wiki, and two lists of links:

• Wiki — Main Page, Help, Page Index (an alphabetical list of every page), and Recent Changes.
• Tools — What links here, Cite this page, Download PDF, and New page if you are logged in and allowed to create pages.

Above the page body is a row of tabs: Article, Edit, Comments, History, and Delete. You only see the tabs you have rights to use.

Creating a page

Log in, then select New page from the sidebar. If the link is not there, you do not hold the create permission — see Who may edit.

The form has these fields:

Field	Notes
Parent page	Optional. Puts the new page under another page in the URL, for example .../wiki/MainPage/Details. Child pages are not linked from the parent automatically; add the links yourself.
Template	Optional. Pre-fills the page text and tags from a page in the Template: namespace.
Title	Required.
Page text	Required. The page body, in wiki markup.
Treat as	Wiki page anyone can edit, Knowledge article with specific authors, or Static (open layout) where it is offered.
Authors	For a knowledge article, the members who may edit it.
Hide author list	Leaves the author byline off a knowledge article.
Allow other users to submit suggested changes	Intended to let others save revisions that an author then approves. It does not work — see the warning under Editing a page.
Allow other users to post comments	Turns the comment thread on.
Lock page. Only administrators may make changes.	Freezes the page against further editing.
Tags	Comma-separated keywords; see Tags. Editing tags alone does not create a new revision.
Edit summary	A short description of what you changed.

Press Preview to see the rendered result without saving, or Save to publish. The page name is generated from your title; to change it later, open the page and use the Rename link on the edit form.

Editing a page

Open a page and choose the Edit tab. The same form appears, filled in. Write your Edit summary, then Save. Say the lab's calibration step changes: open the protocol page, change the paragraph, put new calibration interval in the summary, and save. The old text stays in the history.

Your revision goes live immediately. There is no approval queue for the people who may edit.

Locked pages, and the shipped Help: pages, are editable only by wiki managers.

Attaching and embedding files

The edit form has a file area marked Click or drop file. Drop a file on it or click it to choose one, and it uploads to the page straight away. Then put a macro in the page text where the file should appear:

• [[Image(picture.jpg)]] embeds an image. Add arguments to size or align it: [[Image(picture.jpg, 120px)]], [[Image(picture.jpg, right)]], [[Image(picture.jpg, nolink)]].
• [[File(document.pdf)]] makes a download link.

File types and sizes follow the hub's media settings, so very large files or unusual extensions may be refused.

Wiki syntax essentials

The default parser uses Trac-style markup. The buttons above the page text box insert most of it for you.

You write	You get
'''bold''', ''italic'', __underline__	bold, italic, underline
~~strike~~, ^super^, ,,sub,,	strike-through, superscript, subscript
`code` or {{{code}}}	monospaced, unparsed text
= Heading =, == Subheading ==	headings, one to five = signs
* item and # item (leading space required)	bulleted and numbered lists
term:: then an indented line	a definition list
[[BR]]	a forced line break
----	a horizontal rule
MainPage, [MainPage Main Page]	a link to another wiki page, plain or titled
[http://example.org Example]	an external link
!NotALink	text that would otherwise become a link
<math>x^2</math>	a rendered LaTeX formula

Tables are rows of cells fenced by doubled vertical bars, one row per line:

||        ||= stable =||= latest =||
||= 0.10 =||  0.10.5  || 0.10.6dev||
||= 0.11 =||  0.11.6  || 0.11.7dev||

Wrapping a cell's contents in = makes it a header cell. Leaving a cell empty merges it into the next non-empty one, and a leading <., >., =., ^., or ~. aligns the cell.

Two more blocks are worth knowing. A {{{ … }}} block with #! on its first line runs a processor: {{{#!html …}}} passes raw HTML through, and {{{#!wiki note …}}} draws an admonition box (warning, caution, important, note, tip). And [[Include(PageName)]] pulls the whole of another wiki page into this one.

The wiki ships its own reference pages, reachable from Help in the sidebar: Help:WikiFormatting, Help:WikiMacros, Help:WikiPageNames, Help:WikiHtml, Help:WikiMath, Help:Processors, Help:Admonitions, Help:Templates, Help:Includes, and Help:PageHistory.

Macros

A macro inserts generated content into a page. Calls go in double square brackets, with arguments in parentheses: [[Timestamp]], [[TitleIndex(Help)]], [[Tag(heattransfer)]].

Useful ones include [[TitleIndex]] (a list of every page in this wiki, optionally filtered by a name prefix), [[TableOfContents]], [[Children]] and [[Parents]], [[FootNote(text)]], [[Anchor(name)]], [[RandomPage]], [[Resource(id)]], [[Contributor(username)]], [[YouTube(id)]], [[Video(file)]], and [[Slider]].

Page history

The History tab lists every revision, newest first, with when it was made, who made it, its length and the change in bytes, and its status. Click a date to read that version, or Markup to see its raw wiki text.

Pick two revisions with the radio buttons and press Compare selected versions to see a line-by-line difference: deletions are marked before the change, additions after.

If you may edit the page, each revision also offers Mark as current version and Delete revision. Unapproved revisions show an [ approve ] link. A page's only approved revision cannot be deleted.

Comments

Where a page allows comments, the Comments tab holds the discussion. It is for talking about the article, not for publishing your own views on the subject.

Log in, write your comment, and press Save. Check Anonymous to keep your name off it. Use Reply on a comment to answer it in place. Where the hub has turned comment ratings on, a top-level comment also carries a one-to-five star rating. You can filter the thread to the comments left against one version of the page.

If a comment is offensive, use Report abuse. It is hidden with a notice saying it is under review until hub staff deal with it.

Renaming and deleting

The edit form links to Rename, which changes the page name used in URLs. The wiki's home page cannot be renamed.

The Delete tab removes the page. Tick Confirm deletion. and press Delete. This takes all of the page's revisions, comments, and attachments with it, and cannot be undone.

Special pages

Pages in the Special: namespace are generated on demand rather than edited: All Pages, Recent Changes, New Pages, Short Pages, Long Pages, File List (everything uploaded to this wiki), Search, Cite this page (a ready-made citation for the version you were reading), and What links here.