Class One
Welcome. "Wiki" is a Hawaiian word meaning "quick," because it is designed to be quickly and easily changed. Thus, wiki software is a way to run a website so that more than one person can quickly and easily edit the contents. This is most famously done at Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit," but as you can already see, the wiki format is one of the best ways to assemble information on any subject. If you see a typo, a gap in the story, or even a whole missing subject, you can dive right in and provide that missing or wrong information. Unfortunately, there is a specialized sort of language used on a wiki, and so you do have to learn just a little bit. But I think you will find that after a sharp little curve, it's easy to do most common tasks. In this course, we will bring you up to speed so that you can do the 95% of all the things you might ever want to do on TalossaWiki.
On almost every page on the wiki, you'll see that there are several tabs along the top. Go to this page. You'll see that there are two tabs in the upper-left: "User Page" and "Discussion." "User Page" refers to the actual page you're looking at - the main body of the article. It won't always say "User Page:" sometimes it willl say "Citizen" or more commonly "Main," But in all cases, if you click that link, you go to the article, and you can read about the topic (in this case, the author Vladimir Nabokov).
Every article also has a "Discussion" page. On that Nabokov page, click on "Discussion" now.
Each article's discussion page, more commonly called a "talk page," is for talking about the article's content. Sometimes it's serious talk about the information in the article, and sometimes it's just chit-chat. Here we can see a short conversation between myself and another (nonexistent) user. Later, we'll come back to it. Return to the article itself now, though, by clicking "User Page."
Back looking at information about Nabokov? Good. Look on the upper-right, at the other tabs on the page. You should see "Read," "Edit," "View History," and a little drop-down arrow. You'll notice that "Read" is selected - it looks like that little tab is at the front, because that's what you're doing: you're reading the article. But since this is a wiki, you can do more than read! You can edit!
Click "Edit." That tab will open and come to the fore, and you'll see the actual wikitext that produces what you see in "Read." It should look like this:
'''Vladimir Nabokov''' was a Russian-born author. He was most famous for his book ''Lolita.'' He was not a citizen of <nowiki>[[Talossa]]. In his book '''''Ada''''', however, he did write about a bold new world. So he might have like our own [[Talossa|bold experiment]]. [[Category:Instruction]]