Help:Basic Navigation

A proposed new layout of this page is being drafted at the FreekiWiki:Help portal. Your input is welcome.

If you're new to wikis, there's a fair amount to learn. For the moment, go to Wikipedia's Help pages (especially Wikipedia:How to edit a page), (or see MediaWiki Handbook) for editing help and starting new pages. New help pages will be set up here specific to Free Geek.

How to read the wiki

If you're looking for something in particular, you could try searching for it. The search form is on the left hand side of every page, and searches from it will include both pages with your word in the title and pages where it occurs in the text. If you want to see what people are using the wiki for, you could try Recent changes (the link is on the left) to see what people have been working on recently. If you just want to poke around, you could try clicking on Random page to see where you get (that link is also on the left).

Pages you read will have links in them. Some links will be in red: that means the page they are supposed to go to does not yet exist. Ones in blue should link to more information about the linked term. There are a few special types of links. A link to a page outside the wiki will have a little symbol like this. A page may belong to a particular category, like Working Groups and Help. These categories will be linked at the bottom of the page, and following that link will get you to a list of pages of the same category.

There are also features that allow you to see discussion about the page and the history of changes to the page. If the discussion tab at the top of the page is blue, that means there are comments about the page. The discussion page is where people write about the page and decide how it should be presented and what should be included. If you want to see how the page has been edited in the past, you could click on the history tab to see a list of changes, and then look at what had been changed in each individual instance.

If you want to know when a page is modified, you can click on the watch tab to add it to your watchlist. This will only work if you are logged in.

Your user account

If you create an account and log in, pages you create or change will have your name associated with them. You will also have your own user page where you can put whatever you like, and a discussion page that can be used as your own personal bulletin board. If you don't have an account, all you will have is an IP Address.

Editing pages

Click the edit tab! Your text should be "marked up" so that it will look all pretty later; these pages in the FG wiki give you more information on doing that:

• Wiki markup
• Character formatting

This is in wikipedia:

• Wikipedia:How to edit a page

Adding pages

Following a red link will bring you to a new page with that title. If what you want to write about isn't linked to yet, find a place where a link would be appropriate, add the link, and follow it. If such a page doesn't exist, you could also create a link on your user page or the Sandbox.

If you're itching to write, you could look at Wanted pages to see what topics are often linked-to, but don't yet have a page.