Help
For a printed reference on MediaWiki, get Yaron Koren's book "Working With MediaWiki"
A fully free online version is at http://workingwithmediawiki.com/book/
Help:Contents-mw shows a local copy of the MediaWiki Handbook (with links to the original) Later, I imported a large collection of the MediaWiki Handbook so the Help:Contents article locally should be a good place to start without taking you off this website.
Some more helpful information, especially local customizations starts below.
What's Wikipedia?
- http://wikipedia.org - the largest encyclopedia in the world. Introduction at http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
- Ten things you may not know about Wikipedia
- Ten things you may not know about images on Wikipedia
Using
- See the Help desk to ask questions
- See the MediaWiki mw:Help:Contents for a much greater resource than what is found locally here.
This site uses a customized theme which means that the links are in different areas. Specifically, the main links are in the left navigation column, while "special" links are at the top margin and bottom of each page.
Editing Information
Adding or editing articles is very easy. There is a large volume of "help" information available at the main wikipedia site, so that effort is not reproduced here.
- See the Help Table of Contents
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing
- See the Editor's Handbook
- The Cheatsheet (which includes links to the print cheatsheets)
- What HTML is allowed?
Images
[[Image:foo.jpg]] produces an image You must first upload the image. You can not embed external images, with the notable exception that you CAN use 1.5 million images available in the commons project. [[Media:foo.pdf]] would produce a link to a pdf document, so [[Media:Ejbdesignpatterns.pdf]] produces a link to http://freephile.com/wiki/images/6/6d/Ejbdesignpatterns.pdf
Using External Editors
You can even use tools like OpenOffice or Eclipse to edit this wiki.
Editing from OpenOffice
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/wikipublisher Sun has a new extension to OpenOffice that allows you to write wiki articles from right in your word processor.
Advanced Editing and Customization
Please see documentation on customizing the interface and the User's Guide for usage and configuration help.
Linked Images
By default, when you show an image in mediawiki, it links to it's description page. Sometimes, you want to use an image to link to a page of your choice. Starting in v. 1.14 you can link to an article by using the link= attribute in your image. See many ways to make mediawiki link images
