Help:Contents

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Table of contents

1 What a Wiki is 2 How to get started using it 3 Some editing tips 4 Adding comments 5 Sending messages

What a Wiki is

A Wiki is a Web site that you can edit. It's as simple as that! It differs from other Web sites in that every section of every page has a little link labeled "edit". Click on that link, and you can make changes and additions to that section. Or click on the "edit" tab at the top of the page, and you can edit everything on the page.

Wikis can be open or closed. That is, you may need an account to be able to edit material on a particular Wiki. This Wiki is open to all members of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. Write to ddc-wiki@info-ren.org if you have not yet been registered.

How to get started using it

1. Just browse and read.
2. Log in (link in top right corner of pages) if you would like to make changes or additions to any page.
3. Be respectful of other people's contributions. Use the "discussion" page attached to any given page if you have questions about the content but aren't sure how it can best be modified.
4. Have fun!

Some editing tips

1. Use the tips bar at the top of any editing page for assistance
2. A few useful formatting tricks:
   1. Put a blank line between paragraphs
   2. Make headlines and subheads by putting "=" (and "==") before and after their text
   3. Italic text should be surrounded by two single quotes (''this'' gets displayed as this)
   4. To make text bold, surround by three single quotes ('''this''' gets displayed as this)
3. Creating new pages
   1. Either enter a link on an existing page -- by surrounding the title of the new page with a pair of square brackets ([[NewPageName]])
   2. Or enter the name of the new page in the navigation bar of your browser (in the formhttp://ddc-wiki.info-ren.org/index.php?title=NewPageName)
   3. For an exhaustive description of editing possibilities see the Wikipedia markup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page#Wiki_markup) page.

Adding comments

Each page on the Wiki has an associated page for discussion about the page. Click on the "discussion" tab to view previous comments. Then click on the "edit" tab to modify or add to previous comments. A short-cut for adding comments is provided by the "+" tab, which opens a form into which you can type your comment and a subject line that will appear at the top of your comment. This is a good way to put in your two-cents worth when you don't want to take the time to develop a full-blown edit of some existing page.

Sending messages

Every user on the Wiki has a personal page entitled with their user name. People can use this to provide personal information, as they feel is appropriate. The discussion page for a person's user page is called their "talk" page (see the "my talk" link in the upper right hand corner of all pages), since this is a convenient place to put messages that you would like that person to read. In fact, whenever you add a comment to a person's talk page, they will see an alert "You have new messages" with a hot link to their own talk page, where they can read your message.