User:Kutschke/Draft WikiTips

WikiTips

This page contains background information about the Mu2e wiki and tips for using it.

Introduction

The Mu2e wiki is an instance of MediaWiki that is supported by the Fermilab Information Technology Division (ITD). ITD maintains MediaWiki instances for many experiments and projects. In the interest of keeping things simple to manage they will not install WikiMedia extensions so we are missing some useful functionality. Among the extensions they will not install is that extension that would allow us to make pages public/private on a per page basis. Instead we have one public wiki and one private wiki. There are also separate public and private wikis for Mu2e-II. Look a the top of the left sidebar for links to all 4 wikis.

The public wiki is readonly visible to the general public and is editable by Mu2e members. To be recognized as a Mu2e member you need to log in. Look for a link named "Log in" in the upper right of the page. Use your services password.

The private wiki is readable and editable by Mu2e members. Similarly for the Mu2e-II public and private wikis. There is a separate membership list for the Mu2e-II wiki.

It is possible for Mu2e admins to install MediaWiki Templates. For example the Anchor Template is used in the Glossary.

Navigating the MediaWiki Help

In the middle section of the left side bar, there is a "Help" link, which takes you to the main MediaWiki online help. Everything you need to know is there but it might take a little work to find it. One strategy is to google the string Mediawiki along with the topic you are looking to find. This will often find the correct page within the MediaWiki online help and it might find useful information from a third party page. And you can ask a question on a Mu2e slack channel.

Two other useful links in the left sidebar are "What links here" and "Special Pages". The former tells you which pages in the wiki link to the current page. The latter lets you do things like find a list of all pages in the wiki, see the list of all the pages you are watching (see #Watching Pages), check for broken links, look for pages that are orphaned (ie not linked from another page), and so on.

The rest of this page gives some tips for effective use of the wiki that might take some time to find in the online Help.

User Preferences etc

When you are logged in to the Mu2e wiki, there 5 links on the upper right of the page.

1. Your username. Click on this go to your User page. If your User page does not exist you will see a link to create it.
2. "Talk". Click on this to go to your talk page. If your talk page does not exist, you will see a link to create it. See [1].
3. "Preferences". This will bring you to a page with many tabs to customize the way you interact with the wiki.
4. "Watchlist". This shows a list of recent changes on pages that you are watching. Details can be customized in preferences.
5. "Contributions". This shows a history of pages you have modified.

Search Tips

If you want to search for a multiword phrase, enclose the phrase in quotes. If you leave it unquoted it will search for the OR of the words.

Draft Pages

MediaWiki does not have good support for draft pages. We suggest that you create a draft page in your User area. Others can see it an edit it. When the page is ready, copy the content to a page in the main namespace.

Also use the discussion feature.

Greek Fonts

and Latex fonts.

Watching Pages

You can sign up to be notified whenever changes are made to a page. On the top right of each page, between the "View history" button and the "More" button is a star. If the star is blue-filled, you are watching the page and will be notified by email when it changes. If the star is empty, you are not on the watchlist for the page. Clicking the star toggles the state.

On your Preferences page you can choose to be notified by email whenever a page on your watch list changes.

You can read more about watch lists at [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Watchlist.

Tips for Version Dependent Content

If you are documenting software or an analysis technique, many details may be version dependent. We suggest that you use the wiki to document that material that is common to all versions and to use a GitHub repo to hold the version dependent parts of the documentation. This provides a structure to keep documentation in sync with evolving details. Don't forget to update the documentation when you update the code.

For an example, see the documentation for the Software Tutorial.