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.
It is possible for Mu2e admins to install MediaWiki Templates. For example the Anchor Template is used in the Glossary.
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
Search Tips
User Pages
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.
Adding Figures
Tables
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.