A wiki is “a type of website that allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit all content, very quickly and easily… The term wiki is a shortened form of ‘wiki wiki’ which is from the native language of Hawaii (Hawaiian), where it is commonly used as an adjective to denote something ‘quick’ or ‘fast’ (Hawaiian dictionary)” (Wikipedia).
Editing existing articles (content), creating new articles, and organizing articles into categories are the three main tasks you’ll do on any wiki website.
To edit an article click on the edit link. The edit link is in the upper right side of the page. This puts the article in “edit mode” which lets you edit the content right there on the web page. In Edit mode, you have a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, where you can control and apply formatting without the need for special codes. The exception are internal (within the wiki) links which use square brackets.
For example if you wished to link to a page about a screwdriver you would do the following:
which would give this: Screwdriver
If you wanted the link to remain the same but the text to be different then you would do the following:
[[Screwdriver|A page about screwdrivers]]
which would give this: A page about screwdrivers
Creating an article in a wiki is as simple as finding something that doesn’t exist. A wiki assumes that whenever someone searches for an article and no results are found or clicks on a link to an article that doesn’t exist, that someone will want to create that information for the community. If you navigate to a page that doesn’t currently exist you can add that page by clicking th Edit Page link and entering some content. This automatically creates the page. If you create a link in the new page that points to a page that doesn’t exist within the wiki, then that page to can be created in the same manner.