How To Use This Wiki
About This Page[edit | edit source]
This page will help you with using this Science 3.0 Wiki. It will help you understand what a Wiki is, how to find information and navigate the Wiki and how to contribute to it.
Key Point[edit | edit source]
You don't need permission from anyone or any qualifications to edit this wiki or create new pages on it. This wiki is built by the public, for the public. There will be guidelines (and even rules!) about editing, and your edits may get reverted, overwritten or changed (hopefully with a polite explanation), but the power is with you to change what people read on this site...
What Is A Wiki[edit | edit source]
A wiki is defined on WikiPedia as:-
"a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly using a web browser"
A wiki is really a kind of website where anyone can create and edit the bits of the website. You can create new pages on this site without getting permission from anyone and without even logging in. You can edit any page without logging in (apart from the front page). If you create a log in (which only requires enter a username, an email address and a password) then you can even edit the front page.
At first that sounds a bit crazy, but a Wiki is designed so that there are lots of ways of managing the situation to stop it getting out of control. You can lock down specific pages, easily revert pages to any point in time, block certain computers/users, assign editors to various areas of the Wiki who can approve content before publication. WikiPedia is the best example of this.
This Science 3.0 Wiki runs using the same powerful Wiki engine software as WikiPedia which is called MediaWiki.
Last point: A wiki can be also used as a powerful tool to allow collaboration between groups of people by allowing them to document what they are doing, their interactions, their ideas etc - a bit like people use a shared Google Doc to collaborate, but more powerful due to the structured nature of a website. This Science 3.0 wiki can be used for both purposes: as a structured knowledge base created and edited by the community and as a powerful tool for collaboration between members of the community.
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The home page of the Wiki is at https://wiki.3point0.science/ which takes you to the Main Page
From there you can click on any of the links on the page to dig further into areas you are interested in.
There are different colour links on the site for different types of links:-
- Links for Pages That Exist Show Up In Blue
- Links That Are Red Don't Go Anywhere and that means the page hasn't been created yet. If you click them you are invited to create the page, or go back if you don't want to create it.
On the left bar you will see various useful links relating to the site or page you are on, for example Special:RecentChanges will show what recent stuff has been going on in the Wiki.
At the top of the page you can click on the Discussion tab to see any comments/discussion about the page you are on. If you want to comment on a page this is where to do it (we'll add a section on this page about how to comment soon, but for the moment please refer to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Talk_pages).
You can click on the "Edit" link to edit the page using a visual editor (a bit like a Word document editor)
You can click on "Edit source" if you are more technically knowledgable and want to edit the code that generated the page, which is a bit like HTML code that powers the Web.
You can click "View history" to see the entire history of all the changes made to the page and who did those changes (some may be anonymous).
You can also search the wiki using the search box at the top left.
To see a list of all pages on the Wiki go to Special:AllPages
As the wiki grows it is likely pages will start to be categorised, which will lead to some kind of tree structure evolving for the site, which may be nice to visualise using something like this CategoryTree tool.
For detailed help on navigating a MediaWiki wiki refer to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Navigation
Contributing To The Wiki[edit | edit source]
You can contribute to the wiki by editing existing pages or creating new ones.
For details go to this Contributing To The Wiki page.
ATTRIBUTION NOTE: This page is largely based on https://rebelwisdom.miraheze.org/wiki/How_To_Use_This_Wiki with small changes. Thanks to the original contributors to that page :-) which was created with these licensing terms (same as this page)