Fullscreen
[Show/Hide Right Column]

Print
Tags wiki
Tiki User Guide  »  Using the Wiki

Using the Wiki

At the heart of Tiki is its Wiki feature. By using Tiki's wiki, you can create and edit nearly any page — without needing to learn HTML. And because Tiki allows you to use wiki features in nearly all text areas in other features (such as the forum, blog, and so on), learning the wiki is key to adding nearly any type of content to your Tiki site. Tiki's wiki syntax is among the most feature-rich and stable wikis available. This gives you many (many) ways to create, organize, and collaboratively develop content.

Editing a wiki page
Editing a wiki page.

Understanding Wikis

In brief, a wiki is a computer-based, collaboration system based on three major principles:
  1. Ease of Use: Users shouldn't have to learn HTML or deal with complicated file upload/download protocols, and the inevitable file format incompatibilities, in order to create and maintain documents collaboratively. Typically, wikis solve these problems by using their own, easy formatting syntax (called wiki syntax) and by enabling users to create and maintain documents with a Web browser.
  2. Wide-Open Read/Write Access : If the purpose of a wiki is wide-open collaboration, then every document in the wiki should be instantly available for editing and revision and what's more, anyone should be able to edit an existing wiki document (or create a new one) without having to get permission from authors or supervisors.
  3. Emergent Structure: In physics and biology, the term emergent structure is used to describe the striking (and often beautiful) patterns that emerge from fundamentally chaotic processes, such as the spiral arms of our galaxy. In a Wiki, this term refers to the navigation structures that Wiki users invent as they try to impose pattern and meaning on a collection of Wiki pages.

Although nearly all would agree with the first principle, the second ("Wide-Open Read/Write Access") could sound risky to some people. But don't let a wiki's "open" nature scare you. With Tiki you have several options to protect, limit access to, and restore (if necessary) wiki pages:
  • Permissions: Tiki has an extensive permissions hierarchy. You can restrict editing rights to specific groups of users, make pages read-only, or completely hide pages, as necessary.
  • Lock Pages: As the site administrator (admin) or page author, you can "lock" a wiki page so its content can't be edited by others.
  • Monitor Pages: You can monitor important pages. Anytime the page is edited, Tiki will send you an email notification.
  • Restore from Page Histories: Tiki keeps a detailed history of all changes to each wiki page. This detailed page history means that you can easily compare any two versions in order to see who changed what. You can also quickly restore a page to any prior version.


Wiki History

The term Wiki is short for wiki-wiki, which means quick in Hawaiian. The first Wiki was created (and dubbed "Wiki-Wiki") by Ward Cunningham, a Portland, Oregon, USA computer programmer, in 1995. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki for more information. The largest Wiki is the remarkable Wikipedia, which contains more than 3,000,000publicly-contributed entries, collaboratively-authored, articles.

Tiki's Wiki Features

Tiki's wiki is a full-featured as any other CMS (content management system). Its wiki syntax is simple to learn and use, yet enables you to create complex formatting... without having to learn HTML or upload special files. And by using Wiki Plugins and Modules, you can extend the wiki syntax to create any type of page and contain any type of content that you want. With Tiki's wiki you have:
  • Full control over text formatting
  • Upload and display graphics and images
  • Embed or attach files
  • Easily link to other pages or external sites (and Tiki automatically maintains "backlinks" from pages — even if you change the page name!)
  • Complete page revision history history
  • Create, printer-pretty, and mobile-compatible versions of pages
  • Organize pages by category and tag
  • Structure groups of pages into a hierarchy
  • Fine-grained permissions control

Site visitors (with permission) can review the page's wiki source, save the page to their local PC, or even export the page to their notepad. Tiki can also show you pages that are similar (or related) to any given page, based on tags and content.

Tiki's wiki is truly limitless.

Using the Wiki



Further Reading


Alias

Contributors to this page: Rick23018 points  and system .
Page last modified on Friday 01 July, 2011 12:39:50 UTC by Rick23018 points .
The content on this page is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

SourceHistorySlideshow

Site Language

Reference Guide

Keywords

These keywords serve as "hubs" for navigation within the Tiki documentation. They correspond to development keywords (bug reports and feature requests):



Tiki Newsletter

Delivered fresh to your email inbox!
Newsletter subscribe icon
Don't miss major announcements and other news!
Contribute to Tiki