Help:Wiki Tutorial/Introduction

Introduction

Interview with Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki.

A wiki is a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project and may be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base, as we are doing it for University Innovation Fellows program. It is important to remember that this site is different from that of the UIFs main website. The website has information about the program and other details which are mostly showcase it to external folks, but whereas the Wiki, can kind of internal site for the fellows community, to interact, collaborate, discuss, and create resources which everyone can share, use and contribute to.

Wikis are enabled by wiki software, otherwise known as wiki engines. In our case, we are using MediaWiki. Some important features of a wiki platform are;

• It differs from other web-based systems such as blog software, in that the content is created without any defined owner or leader.
• It has little inherent structure, allowing structure to emerge according to the needs of the users.
• Wiki engines usually allow content to be written using a simplified markup language and sometimes edited with the help of a rich-text editor.

You might be wondering might what this has to do with one of the most popular Wiki-names we hear, Wikipedia. Yes, the online encyclopedia project Wikipedia is the most popular wiki-based website, and is one of the most widely viewed sites in the world, having been ranked in the top ten since 2007. In addition to Wikipedia, there are hundreds of thousands of other wikis in use, both public and private, including wikis functioning as knowledge management resources, notetaking tools, community websites, and intranets. Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described wiki as "the simplest online database that could possibly work." "Wiki" is a Hawaiian word meaning "quick."

Structure

As detailed above this site has established and tailored according the needs of the UIF community. It was initially established in 2013, and had gone through a major revamp and restructuring in 2020. Historically, the Wiki has been used by fellows to create their profiles, resources such as "How to", organisations etc. but post 2020 revamp training of to-be fellows will also take place on the wiki. However, this is not applicable to cohorts or prior. For site maintenance, several structures are in place to keep the pages in tact, and to streamline the work being on done this. This is primarily organised through two standards, namely "Namespaces" and "Categories" - these are further explained the sections fellow.

Namespaces

A namespace is a set of wiki pages whose names begin with a particular reserved word recognized by the MediaWiki software (followed by a colon), and it is also the first level of classifying pages on the wiki. For example, in the fellow namespace all titles begin with the prefix Fellow:. Only pages related to "Main page" or related/similar pages such as cohorts are in the main-space, which do not have any prefix. Only admins (UIF team) can create pages in this namespace. Though MediaWiki software comes with several default namespaces, not all of them are used on this Wiki. The namespaces active and relevant for fellows on this Wiki are:

Namespace	Purpose	Link to the list of pages
(Main)	For main page related/similar pages	[1]
User:	For users, for fellows the fellow page takes precendence	n/a
File:	For files (images, videos etc.) present on this wiki	[2]
Help:	For help pages regarding the wiki, similar to this page	[3]
Category:	further explained in the next section	[4]
Fellow:	For fellows' profiles	[5]
School:	For pages of various colleges and universities where there are/were UIF fellows	[6]
Priorities:	For pages schools' respective student priorities pages	[7]
Resource:	For pages such as "How to XYZ", that would help fellows in enhancing their UIF work	[8]
OrganiZation:	For pages created by fellows as part of their training, regarding certain organisations	[9]
Apart from these for cohorts from 2020, their training pages will be in their respective year namespace, such as 2020: 2021:, which can only be accessed the respective cohorts.