Wiki Introduction and Guidelines

Olivier Mehani olivier.mehani@inria.fr

From Wikipedia: “A wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor.”

• Page edition/creation,
  • Titles, Links, Lists, etc.,
  • Page naming convention: letters. digits, dashes and underscores
    • avoid underscores as placeholders for spaces (e.g. pagename, not page-name or page_name)
    • put dates first if any (e.g. YYYYMMDDpagename)
• Namespaces,
  • Think: “folder” or “directory”,
  • colon “:” used as a component separator,
• File upload.

• The LaRA wiki,
• A central point of research labs members of LaRA - La Route Automatisée
  • public presentation to the outside world (see Caor, Imara),
  • private details, know how and work in progress
    • information storage and sharing within the teams,
    • work alone and/or in group,
• Using ACLs, access rights can be finely tuned:
  • Several user levels: LaRA Wiki Administrators (group admin), People (group user + lab), partners (group partner), others (public, not logged in, ALL)

• Conceptual namespaces at the root containing all the information: groups, Publications, People, contracts…
  • Example content: simcards, LaRAcom, haveit
• One namespace per lab: Caor, Imara with links to the relevant content
  • Content selected by tags (see next slide)
  • Examples: Doodles, CAOR Team
• Don't under-estimate the search function

• Tags are keywords for each page preferably at the bottom

{{tag>tag1 tag2}}

• List of matching pages are then easily built

{{topic>tag +other -unwantedtag}}

• The naming convention of pages holds for tags (it is recommended that tag are pagenames)
• Let's play in the sand!

Specific plugins to cater for our everyday needs (a lot more is available):

• jsmath renders LaTeX math formulas to MathML;
• filelist to create links to a list of files;
• indexmenu to show a tree of the pages and better identify namespace creep;
• gallery to create image galleries (and imageflow for CoverFlow-like shows) from a given namespace;
• google_cal to display the contents of selected Google Calendars;
• doodle to schedule events without relying on third party sites;
• S5 to quickly generate in-browser presentations from a wiki page, and a LaRA theme.

• Where was I unclear?
• What did I not cover?

Remember: The Wiki is a collaborative effort not to lose our expertise. Every newcomer should be told about it and have their account created as soon as possible.

Example good wiki pages: Paulo RESENDE, Olivier MEHANI, haveit, cats