How to use GNC Wiki

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The purpose of the GNC is to provide a collaborative workspace for people and organizations working on and with the Green Needham Collaborative. If you're just looking around to see what's here, you can simply navigate around the pages. Links in the Wiki are generally in blue (purple if you've visited them) and red if the page hasn't been created yet.

The real power of the wiki is as a collaborative tool. Green Needham members have access and can contribute to it - adding content and editing material that's here. We're just getting the wiki under way, but we've created an overall structure that can evolve as Green Needham members and teams use it to add and share content - with each other and with the community. The bottom line is simple - the value grows exponentially as people contribute to and use it.

If you've gotten this far, you're probably wondering how to use wiki software. One of the great advantages of wiki software is that you can add useful and useable (i.e. reasonably good looking) content with just a few simple concepts. You can learn additional concepts and techniques to create much more sophisticated content if you wish.

At the top of each page is a set of tabs.

You're now reading the article page.
There is discussion page for each article page. This is where you can talk about what's on a page, make suggestions for others working on the page, or just add your opinion about the article page.

The other tabs are things you can do with each page. The most important are:

The edit tab is used to change what's on the page.
The history tab shows a history of all the changes to the page
The watch tab allows you to be notified by e-mail whenever a page has changed.

If you'd like to try editing a wiki page, navigate over to the Green Needham Sandbox pages.

[edit] Wiki 101

To change or create pages, you need to register and log in to the wiki.

Select the edit tab at the top of the page to edit a page
- See creating a new page below for some instructions and guidelines on starting a new page

To add text, just type it in.
- To leave a blank line between portions of text, add two blank lines in your typed text

To create lists, start a line with an asterisk * followed by your text (this is a list)
- To create a sub-list without bullets below another list, substitute colons (:) for the asterisks

This is a sub-item item without a bullet

This is a second sub-item item without a bullet

Edit this page to see how this works

To create a live link to another page in the wiki:
- Enclose the full name of the page between two square braces, like this:

[[Action Teams]]

which will look like this: Action Teams

To show something other than the page name in your text, follow the page name with a vertical bar, or "pipe" character "|" and your text before closing the bracket, like this:

[[Action Teams|Getting things done]]

which will look like this: Getting things done

To create a link to another web site, enclose the full web address followed by the text you want to display within single brackets, like this:

[http://www.eere.energy.gov/ The US Department of Energy's Energy Efficiency Office]

which will look like this: The US Department of Energy's Energy Efficiency Office
Note that, unlike a link to another Wiki article, you don't need the "pipe" character between the web address and your title. That's because web addresses don't have spaces, so the wiki knows where your title begins

To create sections in your text, begin a line with two or more equal signs "==", followed by your section name, followed by the same number of equal signs
- Sections are hierarchical, so use two equal signs for a main section, three for a sub-section and four for a sub-sub-section
- Once you create three or four sections, they will automatically appear in a table of contents at the top of the page
- Sections can be referenced directly from elsewhere in the wiki:

[[GNC Calendar#October 2007|October 2007 Calendar]]

will take you to the "October 2007" section heading on the "GNC Calendar" page
and will look like this: October 2007 Calendar

Create a divider line across your page by typing four dashes on a line by themselves

----

Start typing at the first character of each line. If you leave a blank space, your text is put into a box and rendered in a typewriter font, often used to show syntax (as above)

This text was entered with a blank space at the beginning of the line

Perhaps most importantly, all the pages on this wiki (and most wikis) are visible.
- Click the edit tab at the top of any wiki page. You can use the text as an example, and copy and paste it to help you create what you need.
- Just navigate away from the edit screen (or click on the article tab) to leave the edit page without changing anything on the page you're using as an example.

For a more complete introduction, look at this page. From this page, you can also navigate to information about more sophisticated capabilities.

[edit] How to be notified when a wiki page is changed

First, you must authenticate your e-mail id. You only need to do this once.

Select My Preferences from the menu at the top of the page
1. Fill in your name and e-mail ID on the User Profile tab
2. Scroll down and check E-mail me when a page I'm watching is changed
3. Press Save
You will receive a confirmation e-mail - click on the link in the e-mail

At the top of each wiki page, there is a row of tabs. The rightmost one is titled watch. Click this tab on any page you wish to watch. You will be e-mailed when the page changes. While you are using the wiki, selecting my watchlist at the top of the screen will take you to a page showing recently changed pages with those you are watching in bold.

Note that the watchlist will show you the pages you are watching even if you haven't turned e-mail notification on. You just won't receive an e-mail each time a watched page changes.

[edit] Creating a new page in the GNC wiki

We will exercise some control over where information in the wiki goes so that the organization makes sense. But that shouldn't stop you from creating a new page if you can't find a place to put information you'd like to include. Feel free to contact Michael Greis for help if you're not sure where something belongs.

We've created a page where you can go to create new pages when you're not sure where the new pages should ultimately go - Where does this go?.

There are several ways to create a new page, but the easiest is to simply create a reference to it in another page - like the Where does this go? page. You can edit that page, and add the name of the new page in double square brackets, like this:

 *[[My New Page]]

The asterisk makes the item part of a list. Give your page a distinctive and descriptive name - every page name must be unique. Now, save the page you edited with the new page name reference. Once you've done that, the link to your new page will be red, and if you follow it, you'll have the opportunity to start the new page.

Templates are a wiki feature that allow you to reuse the same wikitext in multiple pages. Best of all, you can change the template once, and its effect will change in all the pages you use it.

When you create a new page in GNC wiki, it's important that you include the following at the top of your page:

 {{PHG}}

Those are curly braces "{}" and the capitalization is important. This creates a link at the top of your page back to the main GNC page and the list of GNC categories.

At the bottom of your page, add the following text: