> HelpForBeginners

1. WikiWikiWeb

A WikiWikiWeb is a collaborative hypertext environment, with an emphasis on easy access to and modification of information.

You can edit any page by pressing the link at the bottom of the page. Capitalized words joined together form a WikiName, which hyperlinks to another page. The highlighted title searches for all pages that link to the current page. Pages which do not yet exist are linked with a question mark (or a different rendering in bold red): just follow the link and you can add a definition. That is also the way to create a new page: add a new WikiName to an existing page, save your modification, click on your new link and create the page (more details on HelpOnPageCreation).

You are encouraged to edit the WikiSandBox whichever way you like. Please restrain yourself from editing other pages until you feel at home with the ways a wiki works.

To learn more about what a [Wiki]WikiWikiWeb is, read about [Wiki]WhyWikiWorks and the [Wiki]WikiNature. Also, consult the [Wiki]WikiWikiWebFaq and [Wiki]OneMinuteWiki. This wiki is also part of the InterWiki space, which means you can easily refer to a wealth of information available through other public wiki sites.

Good starting points to explore a wiki are

For more help, see the HelpContents and the HelpIndex pages.

2. Wiki Names

A WikiName is a word that uses capitalized words. WikiNames automagically become hyperlinks to the WikiName's page. What exactly is an uppercase or lowercase letter is determined by the configuration, the default configuration works for Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) characters. See below for how to handle Asian, Hebrew and other non-western character encodings.

When you click on the highlighted page title (i.e. HelpForBeginners on this page), you will see a list of all pages that link to the current page. This even works on pages that are not defined yet.

A question mark before a link, or a different rendering in bold red, means that the page is not yet defined: you can click the question mark to offer a definition (e.g., ?NoSuchPageForReal). If you click on such a link, you'll see a default page that you can edit; only after you save the page will it be created for real. A list of all pages that are not yet created but referred on another page is on WantedPages.

To escape a WikiName, i.e. if you want to write the word WikiName without linking it, use an "empty" bold sequence (a sequence of six single quotes) like this: Wiki''''''Name. Alternatively, you can use the shorter sequence "``" (two backticks), i.e. Wiki``Name.

To learn more about wiki markup, see HelpOnEditing.