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A Wiki for the Sun City Texas Computer Club

What is a Wiki ? A Google search for “What is a Wiki” is likely to produce this result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

This wiki is implemented with DokuWiki. Fundamental concepts for DokuWiki include: page and Namespace. Please note the icon and color of “DokuWiki, page and Namespace” in the previous sentence. The icon indicates a link/reference to content that is not part of this wiki. If you find a broken link, please leave a comment in the Discussion section of this page. Whoops… The discussion section of this page had to be removed. Why? Bad actors. Some people or BOTS, like to advertise and/or deposit inappropriate material on a web page that is “open”. However, all the other pages of this wiki have the “Discussion” feature enabled along with the “captcha” feature. The BOT wars will probably continue.

GOAL!

A wiki is unlikely to maintain relevance without updates and multiple contributors. This wiki was started with a focused purpose and a small number of contributors, but the intent of this wiki is to have multiple contributors. My opinion… More contributors will build a better wiki as indicted by wikipedia. However, the internet exposes this wiki to “bad actors”, which has caused this wiki to require contributors to be registered ( have a login id and password) . If you want to contribute to the content of this wiki, add a comment to any of the other pages and somebody will respond.

Where to start as a consumer of information?

One of the initial purposes of this wiki was to save and share knowledge, that is used by, or helpful to, the volunteers and clients of the Help Center. This wiki contains enough “stuff”, that the answer to “How can this site help me?” is a problem. Todays answers are:

  • Start with the Sitemap feature, then navigate to computerclub:helpcenter to achieve an understanding of how content of the wiki is organized. Notice how “Trace:” (upper left corner of this page) contains a “bread crumb” list of your site navigation choices.
  • Try the “Search” feature at the top of this and every other page of the wiki.
  • Look at the Websites and Tools page. This page contains a lot of links and hints. You might think of it as the the entry point of a rabbit hole.
  • Start with Google Search. Why? Most of the content of this wiki has been derived with the help of Google Search.

Features of this page

If you are looking at this page on a computer with a mouse, focus the mouse pointer on words that have a blue or green color. Words in blue, are links to external references and words in green, are references to documents that exist in this wiki. I should probably state that this document was created with black text on a white background. If you are not viewing this page as black text on a white background, my comments about the color of links may be wrong.

Please note the “Sitemap” feature/link in the upper right portion of this page. Sitemap appears just below the Search box. Sitemap produces an outline of the namespaces and page names in this wiki. Viewing the Sitemap on dokuwiki.org or using the Search window, can be helpful if you are “learning to use DokuWiki or this wiki”. There is a “Discussion” section on most pages, but not this page. The purpose of the Discussion section is to allow comments and suggestions about the content of a page. Discussion is implemented with a dokuwiki plugin. The Discussion feature has been enabled for all pages of this wiki, but not this page. Why? In the early days of this wiki, BOTS discovered the “open” Discussion section and deposited content that was not on subject. Follow this link, for general discussion about this wiki. Discussion is moderated. This means that comments will not appear to other readers of this wiki until an administrator has approved the comment. Why? Because the internet is rich with contributors that choose to make comments that are not about the goals of this wiki. How do I know? Without moderation, comments were added that were not on subject. It appeared the off subject comments were being injected by BOTS. Disabling Discussion for a page requires administrative credentials. Subsequently, the “captcha” plugin was added to this wiki. That has dramatically reduced the incidents of pages of the wiki being invaded by BOTS.

This wiki is a work in progress . It is intended to encourage community readers and contributors. The details of managing content are also a work in progress. The hope is: Dokuwiki has the features that allow residents to contribute and benefit from the content.

Why have this wiki?

As a volunteer in the Computer Club Help Center, it appeared that sharing knowledge was a common goal of the volunteers and clients of the Help Center. Since there are frequent occurrences of “fixing the same kind of problem”, it makes sense to start the process of capturing and sharing knowledge in a public place. Here are some goals

1) Encourage community participation.

2) Gather knowledge in a system that has a functional search.

3) Demonstrate that this “Open Source” tool, can be a component of a “friendly” place to share knowledge.

Help Center

This wiki was born on June 1, 2019. Documentation for the Help Center is one of the goals for this wiki. Hopefully, more eyes and minds will contribute to making this wiki a helpful reference.

Why would you want to use a wiki for sharing information?

Because, it allows multiple contributors to view, create or edit the content of a web server. Think of a wiki as just another internet web site, but the site can allow anyone to view, create or edit content. From the perspective of collaboration, it is an excellent tool. This wiki is structured to address the security concerns of the Sun City Computer Club.

A wiki is a shared resource. Meaning multiple contributors can create and edit content. The set of contributors can be “open” meaning anyone that finds the wiki can contribute or there can be levels of “security” implemented to regulate “who” can contributor while allowing anyone to read the content. Individual name spaces of this wiki can limit contributors and/or consumers(readers). This wiki contains some pages that are only visible to volunteers of the Help Center.

This wiki uses the “Discussion” feature/plugin that allows anyone to “subscribe or unsubscribe” to a page. Why is this important? It puts users, contributors and consumers, in control of things they care about.

The combination of “security” and “Discussion” as relates to this wiki, gives the wiki administrators flexibility on how pages are exposed to the internet.

Pages of this wiki have “history”. History allows consumers to see “what has changed” on a page. The history feature allows “side by side” or “inline” presentation of differences between 2 versions of a page. Note the second icon on the right hand side.. The clock with a circle-pointer icon. Click on it and see what has changed between a couple versions of this document.

Discussion

Pat Maher, 2023/03/08 17:56

Hi Philip. “caused this wiki to require contributors to be registered ( have a login id and password) . If you want to contribute to the content of this wiki, add a comment to any of the other pages and somebody will respond.”

Is this an existing login id? One that can be assigned to me?

Thank you.

Pat Maher

Phillip Lahman, 2019/06/16 19:40

Not logged in comment.

Enter your comment. Wiki syntax is allowed:
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