Computer Club Wiki

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====== How I learned to use Dokuwiki ======

This is about my learning process with Dokuwiki. Why? I want the community to use and contribute to this wiki. I believe some of the fundamentals are not obvious.

===== My understanding of, What is a Wiki, before I started this wiki =====

A wiki is a place for sharing knowledge. Before deciding I wanted to create a wiki, my primary experience with wiki was with [[https://www.wikipedia.org/|wikipedia.org]]. It is an open wiki. Which means: Anybody can register and create or edit content. This wiki is Public, meaning anybody can read the content but you need to be a registered user to create or edit pages. The pages of the wiki have history. You can see who has contributed to the content. You can determine when content changed. Searching on wikipedia worked for me. With search, I found lots of information.

===== What I learned, to create content on this wiki. =====

I read content on Dokuwiki.org. I started here: [[https://www.dokuwiki.org/manual|Dokuwiki Manua]]l . What turned out to be important for me was understanding the [[https://www.dokuwiki.org/index|Sitemap]], [[https://www.dokuwiki.org/namespaces|namespace]] and [[https://www.dokuwiki.org/page|page]]. Learning to use the editor, has been a trial and error process. Since each page has version history, I do not worry about making a mistake. I can always go back in history and recover something I broke. However, I have learned to use the "Save" button when I am editing a page. Forgetting to **Save**, is a **BAD** thing.

In the beginning, I stumbled on the simple stuff. Creating a page turned out to be simple, but not obvious. To create a page you can use search. After I experimented with creating pages and namespaces I installed the Rename Page plugin. The Rename Page feature is only on the right side of the page when you are not editing the page. The Rename Page plugin makes namespace and page reorganization easier. If you do not like the name you selected for a page or do not like the namespace that the page is in, use the Rename Page feature.

===== Search and create page anomalies =====

The manual states that searching for something, offers the opportunity to create a page with the name that you have typed. Sometimes I have seen this feature put "_" within the words I have entered for the page name. My workaround has been: Accept the page name as presented and after creating content in the file, I use Rename Page, to fix the naming problem. I suspect I will eventually find out what I am doing wrong or discover what I have done wrong in the configuration of the wiki.

===== Suggestions Another Happy (?) Wiki Contributor =====

The moral of the story being Don't Give Up.

1.) I originally typed the info into a Google document, got it fairly complete, then copy/pasted the result into the new wiki page I was creating.  When I pasted the text, it the text was all in bold font.  Swiping and clicking the bold font button should have de-bolded it.  However, wiki studiously ignored me, left the text in bold. (Stay tuned until item #4 in this note.)

2.) As I edited the page, I selected 3 lines to be headings, down-leveled them one click.

3.) When I saved the page, I got an error message saying some formatting had been lost.  The lost formatting was two of my three headings attempts were now regular text.

So, I re-opened the just-saved new page in edit mode, to see if I could fix the formatting.

4.) In the page in edit mode, I was able to change all three chosen lines (the two that had magically converted to regular text during first Save, plus one that was at some level heading), one at a time, to Heading 3.  Then I swiped small bits of the still-bold text and was able to de-bold the bits until the whole page was debolded.  As long as my swipe didn't cross any special characters or other non-regular text (e.g. a link), I could de-bold it.  After de-bolding and re-heading, the Save appears to have worked as intended.