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Wiki Editing Tips

or How to be a good neighbor

Remember, a wiki is a communal effort - everything you do can affect what everyone else does.

With that in mind, it's a good idea to remember the following things to reduce hassles for yourself and others:

• Always, always, always put your name in the "Author" box when you edit.
• Bright yellow text is never good. It might also apply to other colors, but a rule of thumb would be: If you need to highlight it to read it, it's bad. Remember, most wiki pages have a white background - it's best to avoid using light shades. Examples of the many options can be seen at Wiki Style Colors.
• Be careful of collisions - Using a common name for a page could result in issues. If your page has the same name as theirs, they will both be considered to be the same page, causing additional confusion and hassles. It's better to use the format
  

• For global pages, pages that relate to the course or pages that everyone will involved in, the standard link format is fine.
• The syntax (:title PageTitle:) allows you to change the title of a page, which can give it a better looking name if you have to use a strange name for the actual page. E.g. if the page is named YourNameAboutMe, you can use (:title About Me:) to change the page title to "About Me"
• Comments on wiki pages are not only useful, but encouraged. The problem lies in the fact that many comments on a page may end up making the actual content hard to read. If comments on an issue start making the page cluttered, it is suggested that you add a discussion page to the wiki by the following process:
  1. Create a link to [[Main/PageName_Discussion|Discuss this topic!]], or something similar, under the current comments.
  2. Copy the comments from the original page to that discussion page. Save the discussion page, and confirm all the comments are there.
  3. Go back to the original page and remove the comments. Save the page. Make sure to fill in the "Summary" box, stating that you moved the comments to a discussion page.
• If you're ever unsure about how certain markup works, or just want to mess around with new things, the Wiki Sandbox is the place to go and experiment.
• YouTube!! A special YouTube plugin is installed and your YouTube videos can show up right in the wiki page. Here is an example (this a robot design by my univ students at a contest in Michigan):

Work in progress