Wiki Wednesday
Workshop on using this wiki!
Welcome to the Wiki Wednesday Workshop!
This workshop and this wiki
The Noisebridge wiki is using free/open source Mediawikisoftware, one of the most commonly used wikis around the world. It's a powerful tool for collaboration. Learn some basics of MediaWiki and the Noisebridge wiki - and that knowledge will also help if you ever want to edit Wikipedia or various Wikia sites.
Wiki history
Wikis were invented around 1994 by Ward Cunningham. You can read a bunch of really neat early ideas on the c2 wiki and there's even more on MeatballWiki. What if the entire web were world-editable and had version control built in? It's worth exploring these ideas!
Getting started
Let's get you set up on the Noisebridge wiki!
New account
- Create an account
- Check email for confirmation link
- Log in
Your user page
- Edit your user page and add some text. Save!
- This is a useful home base.
- At this point, let [User:lizzard] or another wiki admin (ask on Discord or Slack) know your username so we can give you editing powers (limited for newly made accounts to stop spammers)
Basic markup
The editing interface is very basic. For now, it uses wiki markup.
Make a link from your user page to another page in this wiki: double brackets, like this: [[Wiki Wednesday]].
You can create a new page this way, by putting double square brackets around a word or phrase for a page that doesn't exist. Try doing that now, on your user page, and save. The link will be red. Click it to make your new page! Once a page exists, the link should be blue or purple.
Try the formatting buttons at the top of the edit window on your user page.
You can also use some basic html markup. "Help" in your sidebar will link to formatting / markup tips!
Some basic tools
Check out some of the obvious links in the navigation bars at top and side.
- Contributions (top nav)
- * Shows wiki pages you have created or edited.
- Recent changes (sidebar)
- * Shows all edits by everyone, most recent to oldest. You can see this without being logged in!
- Random Page (sidebar) Just for fun.
More amazing tools
Special pages. Please just click them all at some point and see what's there! But here's some highlights:
Events, Classes, and Transclusion
You can add any page to a Category by adding a special link to it. The convention is to add these Category tags at the bottom of the page.
For example, adding [[Category:Accessibility]] to a page will automatically add it to this page: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Category:Accessibility
You can edit Category pages and add more stuff at the top!
Notice on the Noisebridge home page we have that Events section. Click the header where it says Events and Classes! It's a link! It will take you to the page.
Another example:.
Back to Category:Events. This page has some more useful stuff in it. Click its edit button to view the source.
Scroll down a bit to find the <onlyinclude> tag and its closing tag. The stuff between those tags is transcluded into the main page!
Now let's go look at the main page and edit it to see how the transclusion is set up.
Meeting notes
It's clunky but it works. Here's how to do the meeting notes.
You will want a few tabs open.
- https://pad.riseup.net/p/nbmeeting
- https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meetings
- https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meeting_Notes_Template
- https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Category:Meeting_Notes (scroll to bottom, page to the last page)
- Open the meeting notes template, and click edit. Copy the text in the edit box. Then close the template tab!
- Open up the riseup pad, and paste into it.
- Find the last meeting, open it, note the number of that meeting and the date.
- In the riseup pad:
- * fix the meeting number where it says the XXXth meeting of Noisebridge.
- * Fix the date
- * Fix the links to previous meeting and next meeting
- Now you are ready to take notes in the riseup pad!
After the meeting:
- Clean up the notes in riseup
- Go back to the tab with last week's meeting notes
- Click on the link to "next meeting" which should create you a page with the correct date
- If it wasn't set up correclty, fix it :) Then make your page
- Now paste in the notes from riseup