Wiki Best Practices

Here are a few hints/rules for adding pages to the Wiki. Following these guidelines will help to make this wiki an effective (and useful) documentation tool and assist others in helping to find the right information. They are sorted below in order of importance.

Avoid Orphaned Articles

Your article won't go anywhere if it isn't linked elsewhere in the site. Add links to the article using the double square bracket syntax or hyperlinks when the article title is used in other parts of the wiki. You want to know how people can do down a rabbit hole on Wikipedia? It's because all the articles are linked to each other.

Use subpages for hierarchical organization

If you are talking about a specific aspect of a larger topic, then subpages are a good idea. These allow for individual pages about a common topic to be organized together naturally. For example, if talking about a specific PHASTA feature, you could make a subpage for that feature.

Subpages are created with a slash between the subpage and it's parent. So creating a page at https://fluid.colorado.edu/wiki/index.php/PHASTA/New-Feature would create a subpage.

Using subpages allows for automatic backlinking, keeping everything pretty organized. This is done by adding a:

== Subpages ==
{{Special:PrefixIndex/PHASTA/}}

to the Parent page. Because of this automatic backlinking, this is generally preferable to having a category, which requires manually tagging each related page.

Put Articles in Appropriate Categories

Categories help to group useful information together. Their syntax is [[Category:{NAME_OF_CATEGORY}]].

List of Categories. If you don't find a category that's applicable, add a new one (though maybe ask around to get opinions).

Note that there are subcategories. As a rule of thumb, an wiki article should be placed in as specific a category as possible.

Format Your Wiki Page

This can seriously help the usability of a wiki page. It makes it more readable and makes finding specific information significantly faster. Do things like:

• Use headings and subheadings (it'll auto-populate the "Contents" outline at the very top of the article)
• Use bullet and number lists (they can be hierarchical as well)
• Make text in a "code" format using code HTML flags: <code>print('Hello World')</code> creates print('Hello World')

See Making_A_New_Wiki#Formatting for more information and resources on formatting your wiki page.

Continue to Make Improvements

Wikis are community built; therefore, not all the work should be done yourself. After writing the initial article, upload and seek feedback on it. Other users can discuss potential changes in the Discussion panel of any article and implement when a consensus is reached.