Wiki Basics and usage in Cyn.in

Wiki Basics

A Wiki is a set of pages editable by collaborators in your space. Using a wiki is almost as natural as using a blackboard in real time. No special knowledge of HTML is needed. Every page in a wiki can be amended, edited, or even deleted by anyone with a web browser.

From a user's perspective, the mechanics are simple. Typically each wiki page in cyn.in, will have a set of links to:

• Switch from the View mode to an Edit mode
• Show the revision history of the current page - indicating the changes made to the wiki
• Add categories to make the wiki page more search-able
• Add Related Content to the wiki page
• Attach files to wiki pages
• Jump to the wiki's home page (This is the wiki home page)
  
• Search the full text of all pages in the wiki
  

Wiki Usage

Wikis, due to their simplicity and flexible nature, can be easily used for applications like documentation, reporting, information management systems, project management, glossaries, dictionaries. Wikis facilitate collaborative creation, finding, shaping and sharing of knowledge.

Start structuring your Wiki:

To start with, the Wiki home page is a place where people first land and get an idea of the goal of the wiki, what are you trying to achieve and how you are going to put the information together in the wiki itself. This helps as people know what they are expected to do here.

Editing a Wiki Page

It's the Edit link that makes a wiki special. Click on that and you'll see the core content of the current page redisplayed in your browser, but now it's inside an editable rich text WYSIWYG editor.

Follow the steps below to create an index page with a list of links to other pages. As you outline the main hierarchy of pages in this wiki, it will act as a navigation for yourself and others:

1. Click on the "Edit" link in the Blue bar above to start this wiki home page
2. Simply delete the content here, add your own title, description and content
3. The WYSIWYG editor lets you create stylized wiki documents

Creating Wiki Pages

Using Wiki Linking

Wiki Linking allows you to create pages simply by putting [ [ double square-brackets ] ] around a word or phrase making it the title of the new page.

The wiki link appears with a + sign next to it, indicating that such a page doesn't exist yet and collaborators in this space can create that page by clicking on it. Once you click on the link, a new page will be created with the title as mentioned between the double square brackets.

Using the "Add" interface

The Green Add Button in the blue actions bar above, allows you to add wiki pages, without linking to them from within the content of the wiki page. These are the steps involved:

• Click on the Green Add Button and select Wiki Page
• Add a Title and Description for the new wiki page you want to create
• Save the wiki page and once done, click on Edit to start writing on the wiki page
  

View all pages of the wiki

You can view all the pages of the wiki in the Contents tab on the wiki home. From any page in the wiki, click on the wiki home page in the navigation on the left.

Once on the home, click on the Contents tab in the blue actions bar and you will get a tabular view of all the pages in the wiki. Here, you can bulk manage the wiki pages like change workflow states, copy, move or delete.

Adding metadata to the wiki pages

Some additional features help make the cyn.in wiki more interesting and useful.

Adding Categories

A category in cyn.in is nothing but a tag, that can be pre-defined during the information architecture of the entire system or can be added by the user who creates the wiki page. The categories are displayed at the bottom of every page and make the content more searchable.

The combination of folksonmony and taxonomy make the categorization in cyn.in unique and very useful. To add a category to a wiki page, simply edit the wiki page and go to the categories section. Here, you can choose from a set of categories defined by other users or create your own, by typing them in the New Categories block.

Adding Related Content

Any content in the cyn.in site can be linked with the wiki page to show other related blogs posts, images or files.