View source for CATUG wiki:Using this wiki

This '''introduction to the CATUG wiki''' is intended to be helpful for any users who are not familiar with wikis. 

Wikis are a type of website designed to make it easy for many editors to collaborate. The most famous is Wikipedia, which has thousands of active editors.  

=Links within articles=

A useful feature of wikis is the ease with which editors can add links between pages.
Internal links within the wiki appear as blue words like this: [[software bundles]]. '''Just click on the blue words''' to go to that page. 

[[Red links]] are internal links to pages that don't exist yet.  When an editor includes one of these on a CATUG wiki page, there is generally an intention to create an article sooner or later. 

External links have a small icon at the end, e.g. [https://www.macupdate.com/ macupdate.com]. 

It is possible to make links to external wikis which appear like internal links, e.g. [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Copyrights|Wikipedia:Copyrights]], but any like this in CATUG wiki should always be clear from their context.

=Navigating the wiki=

Rather than commit ourselves to maintaining a set of index pages, we have simply used a dynamic feature of wikis called '''categories'''. These form a hierarchical structure to navigate between pages with similar or related content.  Category links appear at the '''bottom''' of wiki pages. Clicking on a category link takes the reader to a page showing a list of all pages within that category.  As well as articles, a category may also contain sub-categories; if so, these are shown first, before the list of articles. At the bottom of the category page there are generally links to head categories, i.e. higher up the hierarchy.  

From every page, users can also click in the Navigation area at the top left, taking the link to [[:Category:Main topics|"Categories" (main topics)]] or the [[Main Page]]. 

However, the most useful way to navigate is often to type a word or phrase in the '''Search''' box at the top right. If there is no page with a title exactly matching the words searched for, the wiki displays a list of articles including these words. 

=Is the advice up to date?=

The date of each article should be stated in he "Credits" section at the end.  Also, every page in a wiki has a "View history" button at the top, from which you can see all previous versions, often with brief notes of what was changed. 

=How can I help?=
If you see something out of date or otherwise wrong, please contact [mailto:wikiservant@catug.org wikiservant@catug.org], either to point out the error, or to ask for your own user account so that you can edit pages yourself. 

Once you have a user account, see our two help pages for editors, [[CATUG wiki:Formatting guide]] on wiki markup, and [[CATUG wiki: Notes for editors]] which is our style guide for good practice. 


[[Category:CATUG wiki|Using this wiki]]