FAQ Welcome Guest

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Q: OK - I registered. What do I do now?

Answer: When you register, your first personal page is created with your registration name as the topic title. From that page, you may create your own collaboration work space consisting of a personal home page, an author's tool kit, resume, and pages you are authoring. Editing your own topics is a great way to practice editing and changing pages for new users. The GettingStarted page may help you with next steps.

Q: Everybody can edit any page. This is scary. Doesn't that lead to chaos?

Answer: TWiki is one of many WikiWikiClones, the first one was built by Ward Cunningham. Collaborating the Wiki way is different from other collaboration tools like Usenet. A distinct Wiki culture forms around these tools:

• Any and all information can be deleted by anyone. Wiki pages represent nothing but discussion and consensus because it's much easier to delete flames, spam and trivia than to indulge them. What remains is naturally meaningful.

• Anyone can play. This sounds like a recipe for low signal - surely wiki gets hit by the unwashed masses as often as any other site. But to make any sort of impact on wiki you need to be able to generate content. So anyone can play, but only good players have any desire to keep playing.

• Wiki is not WYSIWYG. Contra the dumbing down of programming, it's an intelligence test of sorts to be able to edit a wiki page. It's not rocket science, but it doesn't appeal to the TV-watchers. If it doesn't appeal, they don't participate, which leaves those of us who read and write to get on with rational discourse.

• Wiki is far from real time. Folk have time to think, often days or weeks, before they follow up some wiki page. So what people write is well-considered.

(quoted from WhyWikiWorks at Ward's original Wiki system, the Portland Pattern Repository, Wiki:WhyWikiWorks)

Q: What can I read to learn to edit pages

Answer: WelcomeGuest, GoodStyle, WikiSyntax, TextFormattingFAQ

Q: How do I delete or rename a topic?

Answer: These two questions are answered together because often when you think you want to delete a page, more often it makes sense to rename the page to contain more context, e.g. rename it to include the date.

You can rename, move and delete topics directly from your browser. Moving lets you transfer a topic from one web to another. The soft delete moves a topic to the special Trash web, where it's hidden but can be "undeleted" with system administrator access.

Click [More] on the control bar at the bottom of the page you want to change, then choose [Rename/move], and make your changes to that screen.

Q: How do I delete or rename a file attachment?

Answer: You can move and delete attachments directly from your browser. Moving lets you transfer an attachment from one topic to another. The soft delete moves an attachment to the special TrashAttachment topic in the Trash web, where it's hidden but can be "undeleted" with system administrator access. Please note that you cannot rename an attachment in the current TWiki release.

Click on action on the file in the FileAttachment table, then in the Update attachment screen choose [Move attachment], and make your changes to that screen.

Q: Why does the topic revision number not increase when I edit a topic?

Answer: The same topic revision will be used when you save a topic again within a certain time frame (one hour by default). This is to prevent unnecessary topic revisions when you do several edit cycles in a row. Note that a new revision is created if another person edits the same topic, regardless of the time.

Q: What happens if two of us try to edit the same topic simultaneously?

Answer: TWiki allows multiple simultaneous edits of the same topic, and then merges the different changes automatically. You probably won't even notice this happening unless there is a conflict that cannot be merged automatically. In this case, you may see TWiki inserting "change marks" into the text to highlight conflicts between your edits and another person's. These change marks are only used if you edit the same part of a topic as someone else, and they indicate what the text used to look like, what the other person's edits were, and what your edits were.

TWiki will warn if you attempt to edit a topic that someone else is editing. It will also warn if a merge was required during a save.

Q: When topics change, how can I get notified?

Answer: You can receive an e-mail notification when topics change. In the left menu bar, click on the word "Notifications". That will take you to a page called WebNotify. Edit the WebNotify page and add your wikiname in alphabetical order to the bulleted list. That will subscribe you to a daily e-mail digest listing each page that changes. If you aren't interested in every page that changes, read the examples on the WebNotify page to learn how to list the topics (with wild card characters) that interest you. Note: there needs to be a colon ':' between your wikiname and the list of pages.

Another way to stay current with changing topics is to use RSS Feeds. You can create RSS feeds to see changes through your browser's bookmarks. To see recently changed pages click on the "RSS Feed" link in the left menu bar and follow the subscription procedure. I keep a folder of feeds on the main bookmarks tool bar of my browser. By just holding my cursor over the bookmark, I can see links to all of the recently changed pages. Also, if you perform a search, you will be offered an opportunity to subscribe to an RSS Feed based on that search criteria.

Q: How does version control work?

Answer: When you save a topic the revisions from the previous topic are saved in a shadow file and the system can use the shadow file to show you earlier versions of the topic. Tools are available to compare the differences between two versions. For example, if you are on version 32 of a document and want to see version 28 or compare version 28 and 32, all that is possible because the wiki remembers all the changes. Use the "History" choice from the menu bar at the bottom of each topic.

Note: If you make several saves to a topic in a short period of time (< 1 hour), the version number will be the same for the entire group of changes.

Q: What about printing pages?

Answer: There is a printer friendly style sheet that will reformat your page with just the content you are interested in. Click on "Print Version" in the bottom menu bar to reformat the page.

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• Related: WelcomeGuest, GoodStyle, WikiSyntax, TextFormattingFAQ, GettingStarted

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