• Four steps to editing a page:
  • Lock the Page
  • Edit the Page
  • Save the Page
  • Unlock the Page
• Try the Sandbox

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Editing pages is actually very easy. People generally have trouble because they expect it to be complicated. Regular html tags do not work in a wiki. Wikis are made to use plain text. Basically, you just type to create content, and put a blank line between paragraphs.

Four steps to editing a page:

• lock
• edit
• save
• unlock.

Lock the Page

You need to lock a page before you edit it, so two people do not edit the same content at the same time.

To lock a page, click on the "lock" button at the bottom. If a person has already locked a page, you cannot edit it, as someone else may already be working on it.

(Note: No pages should be left locked unless they are copyrighted material. Copyrighted material should ALWAYS be locked. Administrators will also lock various pages for various reasons, and they may remove the lock you have placed on a page, if you are no longer editing it and it does not have a copyright notice.)

Edit the Page

Click on the Edit icon (it looks like a sheet of paper with a pencil) or the edit button at the bottom. This will open up the edit window for you, and you can see the content of the page in a text area. The first thing you probably will notice about this is the funny text at the top of the text area, that has dashes and equal signs and perhaps other strange combinations of characters. This is Wiki syntax, but I'll get to that in a minute. For now, just ignore it, and put the content below the three dashes.

Type your content in as plain text, leaving a blank linke between paragraphs. That's about all you need to know to create a page.

If you have not read the page on what content is and is not allowed, please do so.

When you are editing a page, you have several immediate helps.

The first is Quicktags, just to the left of the edit box. They let you add various things into the page. They will create the Wiki syntax for you. If you don't see all the little icons below "Quicktags", click on the plus next to Quicktags to open them.

Way down at the very bottom of the page is "wiki help." This contains explanations for how to do all the formatting commands. You can open it up on the page while you are editing, if you have JavaScript enabled.

If you want to see the full documentation for wiki syntax, it is here.

Above the edit box is the Apply template drop-down. If your page does not have a table of contents at the top, choose "Default Wiki Page" from this list. It will insert the code to create a two-level table of contents at the top of the page, and it will also take you into preview mode. (Note: in the preview, you won't actually see the pages in the table of contents, because the preview hasn't been saved into the structure yet.)

Between the Apply template and the edit box is the smileys, which are generally used in Forums and Blogs, not in pages, but you can click on one to include it.

Save the Page

Don't forget to save your edits. The session length is 30 minutes. If you've been typing (or thinking) that long and haven't saved, you'll lose your work on the page. If you hit preview, you will not only see what you've done so far (without it being visible to anyone else,) you will refresh your session, so you won't lose what you are working on. But don't forget to save when you are done!

Unlock the Page

When you are done editing and saving, don't forget to unlock the page. Click on "unlock" at the bottom of the page when you are viewing it.

Try the Sandbox

If you want a place to experiment, click on Sandbox, under Wiki in the left column. That is a page where you can try all sorts of stuff, and preview and save it. It is NOT part of the structure of the site, but decency rules still apply.