Welcome to the Elftown Wiki!

A Wiki (or actually Wiki-Wiki) is a set of webpages that anyone can edit. The Elftown wiki can be used for sharing information, writing collaborative stories, text based "adventures" and whatever else you want! It is the Elftowners who make the wiki and decide what is to be there!

Letting everyone edit the pages might sound dangerous, but it isn't. All old versions of each page are saved, and it is easy to revert to an old version of a page if someone has messed it up. Also, on each page you can see who changed it last, so if you misbehave you will be identified. Messing up wiki pages on purpose isn't the best way to make friends on Elftown...

Often the creator of a page acts as a "moderator" and cleans it up if someone breaks it. And it is perfectly all right for anyone to fix spelling mistakes, grammatical errors or other things that don't look good.



Adding Comments and Editing Pages

Near the bottom of the page there is a field for adding comments to the page without editing it and some buttons for determining how the comments are displayed or for not showing the comments at all.

Just above the comments there is a button labeled "Edit this page". When you click on it, you get some new fields at the top of the page. First there is a field called "Page name". Usually you don't want to change the page name, so leave it as it is. If the page is password protected, or if you are the creator of the page, there will be a field for entering the password for editing the page. To password-protect your page that you've created, you enter a new password in this field.

Finally, there is a larger box where you can edit the contents of the page. The contents can be formatted with Pseudo HTML. Don't remove the text that is in the box unless you want to delete all old contents of the page! What you usually want to do is to edit the contents, for example, by adding or changing something.

When you have made your changes, click on the button labeled "Submit changes to this page", and you will see the page as it looks after your modifications.



Making a New Wiki Page

First, pick a name for your wiki page. Go to any wiki page (this one, for example), and you will find a field labeled "Go to wiki-page" below the status bar to the right. Write the name you chose for your new page in the field and click on "Go!". If you get anything else than an empty wiki page with the text "This is an empty page", the name is taken and you must pick another name.

When you have found a name that isn't taken, you can edit the page as described above.

When you have made your page, you probably want to add a link to it from somewhere (another wiki page, your bio, etc). The "code" for a link looks like this: " [page_name@wiki] ". Put the name of your page instead of page_name. On the wiki page the link will look like the page name. Look at how others have written links if this sounds confusing!

When you create a new wikipage or change one already existing page you will automatically start watching it, but if you just write a comment it can be a wise idea to do it manually. Click on "Start watching this wikipage" to start watching it, which means that you will get a notification below the status bar each time someone edits the page or comments on it. If you don't want to watch the page, you should at least add it to your notes, so that you'll find it even if all links you have made to it would get removed.



Viewing Older Versions of a Page

Below the Elftown Status bar on each wiki page you can see a box with the name of the latest author, the name of the page and the current version number. There is also a button saying "Previous version", which takes you to the previous version of the page, and a version number field that you can use to go directly to any older version of the page. If you are looking at an old version of the page, there will also be a button saying "Next version", which takes you to the next version.



Restoring a page to an older version

If your wiki page has been messed up (intentionally or unintentionally), you will probably want to restore it to the latest "correct" version. That is actually fairly easy.

First click on "Edit this page" to go to "edit mode" (this is important!). Then you need to find the latest correct version of your page. If you know that the page was messed up recently, the easiest way is to click on the "previous version" button until you find a correct version.

When you have found the newest correct version (the one you want to revert to), you just click on "Submit changes to this page". Voilá, page restored!

Some more hints on how to find the latest correct version of a wiki page can be found on the page called who messed up my wiki.



Now Try it Out!

Now that you know everything (?) about the wiki you are probably anxious to try it yourself! Go to the playground [edit] 1574 and experiment a bit!



Good luck and have fun!

If you have questions or want to discuss the wiki, go to the Elftown, wiki forum: <URL:view_forum.html?forumnr=22>
Also see the Wiki FAQ or try the quick-guide-to-wiki!
For more information about how to format the text on wiki pages, see the Pseudo HTML.



Go or return to:
-Poll How-to for explanation on wiki-polls
-The wiki-index
-The list of guided tours
-The wiki FAQ
-The wiki help page
-Elftown - Help
-The help index