Eric C Retired 
TX, USA
2321 Posts
I won't sugar coat it, there is a learning curve for using a wiki. There is a lot of stuff, but you only really need to know some basics to get started.
The internet works by having links from one page to another, and the wiki software used for the Gliderpedia is designed to make creating links to other pages, and thus creating pages, fairly easy. There are basically two things you need to know, how to create a link and how to create a page. The two concepts are closely related.
There is some information in the Gliderpedia on this, [url]http://www.sugarglider.com/gliderpedia/index.asp?HelpOnCreatingANewPage[/url]
[url]http://www.sugarglider.com/gliderpedia/index.asp?a=titlesearch&txt=Help[/url]
Linking
Pages need to link to each other. A website is not like a traditional book in that chapters need to be organized linearly to make sense. A webpage can give you instant information about specific topics by simply linking the appropriate word to a corresponding webpage about that topic. What I mean by this is the following: I really like [url="http://www.sugarglider.com/"]sugar gliders[/url] and I use [url="http://www.google.com/"]google[/url] to find information.
Links in a wiki have to be formatted a particular way. Different wiki software does this differently, so I'm only going to explain how the Gliderpedia does this.
Links are constructed from page titles. A title can either consist of one word or multiple words. That last sentence is obvious, but it is an important distinction.
Links are automatically created by capitalizing the first letter in each word and removing the spaces. That bold stuff is important, and is the key in all of this. If you wanted to create a page with the title "A Page About Sugar Gliders", you would simply type APageAboutSugarGliders and save the page in the wiki, and the wiki software will automatically split the title according the capital letters and create a link to the page. Earlier in this message I posted a link to a page in the Gliderpedia title "Help On Creating A New Page." To link to that page you only have to type HelpOnCreatingANewPage and it's automatically created, with spaces in between the words.
This type of automatic link create is called CamelCase. Camels have humps on their backs, and smashing words together gives the impression of humps due to certain letters being capitalized. :-)
The only problem is how does one link to a page that has a single word as a title? A single word can't have more than one capital letter, unless you type it like CaPiTaLiZeD, but that would create a title like "Ca Pi Ta Li Ze D", which is ugly. So, there is a special way to make links for single words, and that's using double square brackets, like so, [[Eric]]
More information can be found in
[url="http://www.sugarglider.com/gliderpedia/index.asp?LinkPattern"]Link Pattern[/url]
[url="http://www.sugarglider.com/gliderpedia/index.asp?WikiName"]Wiki Name[/url]
[url="http://www.sugarglider.com/gliderpedia/index.asp?HelpOnLinking"]Help On Linking[/url]
Sorry for being so long winded. SimplySmashWordsTogether is what it all amounts to.
Creating A Page
There are essentially two ways to create a page.
One is to visit [url="http://www.sugarglider.com/gliderpedia/index.asp?HelpOnCreatingANewPage"]Help On Creating A Page[/url] and simply type the page title in the text box on the page. Be carefull! It allows you to put spaces in the title, and I need to fix this, so when creating a page this way, remember to not have any spaces and to capitalize the first letter of each word.
The second way is to simply create links to pages that don't exist yet. If you're editing a page or creating a new one, simply use either CamelCase or the double brackets to create links. Put the links where you think more information could be usefull about something that isn't exactly on topic for the current article.
Think of these links to pages that don't exist yet as a plant's root system, and these are places where the linking and page creating is encouraged to grow. These links you create are hints for others, essentially saying "Hey, why don't you writing something about this topic?"
These links to pages that don't exist look different from normal links, the words aren't link, there is a question mark next to the word to denote that it doesn't go anywhere. Simply click the question mark to be taken to the page, and then click on the "Describe This Page" to start editing. One a page is created like this, all pages throughout the gliderpedia that linked to it will have their links updated automatically.
Conclusion
Basically all you need to know is how to create links. If you edit an existing page to add a link to a page that doesn't exist yet, all you have to do is save the changes and click on the link to create the page. It's really that easy.
The Sand Box
If you want to experiment, use the [url="http://www.sugarglider.com/gliderpedia/index.asp?SandBox"]Sand Box[/url] page. The sand box page is intended for to use a place to learn and experiment on how different things work. Edit and go crazy, that's what is is for.
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