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.
Contents
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.
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>
createsprint('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.