Basic Wiki Guidance

Getting Familiar with the Wiki
A general understanding of how this wiki works and is organized is a really good starting point.
 * One of the most useful starting pages is Special pages, shown in the left-hand panel. From here, you can see the various structural elements of the wiki. A couple of the more useful links on that page are Categories and All pages. But, do check out many of the namespaces and listings on this zWiki
 * Another useful page is Recent changes, also shown on the left-hand panel. Here you can see newly added and edited pages, who made those edits, and prior versions
 * Click on all the links, just to become familiar with the organization and capabilities of this zWiki
 * Note that page links that exist are shown in blue, page links that have not yet been started in red , and visited pages shown in purple

Entering Your First Content
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please only first enter content into a new page so as to not overwrite existing stuff !!!

There are two ways to create a new page on this wiki:


 * 1) Perhaps the easiest way to create a new page is to add a new extension to the current browser address URL. Note that you can use either spaces or underscores; underscores are automatically entered for spaces in the final URL
 * 2) Alternatively, you could embed a link in an existing page when editing it, simply by entering New Page in double square brackets (the convention for internal link references; single square brackets are the convention for external links). Note as above you can use either spaces or underscores; underscores are automatically entered for spaces in the final URL. Also note that the wiki will cap the first letter in the URL and ALL capitalization and spacing is recognized and distinguished. Thus, Main page is not the same as Main Page nor MainPage
 * As noted, ALL wiki pages are first letter capped; a good practice is to name with initial caps and use spacing for readability
 * (BTW, you can use link references different than the URL. For external links, the reference is separated by a space, such as OSF, which shows as OSF. Alternative, for internal links the reference is separated by the bar character, such as MainPage , which shows as MainPage

Wiki Editing Conventions
Once you start entering content, you likely will want to learn more about wiki syntax (what is known as wikitext) and how to edit. See especially the editing guidelines link.
 * Whenever you make a major edit, please note the reason why on the bottom annotation of the edit page.

Reverting Content
Should you happen to screw up and want to revert to a previous version of a page, do so via the History tab for any page, pick the version desired, Edit it, and save it. Please so note on the bottom annotation your reasons for reversion.

Decide on Editing Framework
You have three choices of editing framework and, depending on how you install and use, you may switch between them:
 * 1) The standard wikitext, which has a limited toolbar (you need to remove the FCKeditor option to see this alone; see below)
 * 2) The FCKeditor WYSIWYG rich-text editor. It is the one installed by default.  To disable FCKeditor, do so by checking the "Disable rich editor" checkbox on your my preferences dialog Misc tab
 * 3) Use of the WYSIWYM (what-you-see-is-what-you-mean) WikED editor, which also has some nifty functionality. After install using the Greasemonkey option, you can turn off or on the Greasemonkey version of WikED via the Greasemonkey face on your status bar.

Note you if you have the last two installed you can switch between them or turn them off.

Become Familiar with the Guidelines
Become familiar with this site's:
 * Guidelines for Contributors, which is the basic intro to how to contribute to the site, and
 * Documentation guidelines, which set the workflow and best practices guidelines for how to use and add documentation content to this site.