What's a wiki?

Pioneered by Ward Cunningham, and named after the Hawaiian word for ‘quick’, a wiki is a website that makes it easy for anyone to contribute pages, and link them together.

Wikis are a type of social software that make it easy to communicate online. As simple to edit as it is to read, the wiki makes for the perfect online collaboration tool.

In recent years, wikis have become more and more popular: as repositories of programming wisdom, as social experiments, as massive online encyclopaedias, and increasingly as tools of savvy businesses, looking for a simple but effective way to share content and information both inside their organisation and out.

And that's where Confluence comes in.

How do I edit a page?

To edit the whole page at once, click the "edit this page" tab at the top. To edit just one section, click the "edit" link to the right of the section heading. To edit on Wikipedia, you type in a special markup language called wikitext. See the cheat sheet for the most basic wikitext codes. See How to edit a page for more details and examples of making links, using bold and italics, linking to images, and many other things

How do I make links?

The most basic syntax for making "wikilinks" in the wikitext is surrounding the words of the link with double square brackets: [[page name]]. The "page name" can come from guessing it or from recollection (you will test these before saving the page), from the search box name-completion mechanism (if JavaScript is enabled within your web-browser) or by visiting the target page itself and copying directly from its URL (all the text to the right of wiki/ in the address bar) or title line (It will be the first line, and it will be in large bold font.) The linking mechanism ignores "_" underscores or any extra spaces. See Wikipedia linking for more linking grammar such as when to link and when not to link. See help with links for more linking syntax like the fact that the capital letter that begins a page title will work just fine in lowercase (for your new links that don't begin a sentence).

Use "Show preview" to test the soundness of the new link (unless, of course, you use cut and paste from the target page.) Testing the soundness of your link from a preview may warn about losing unsaved edits, but you will not lose unsaved edits. (See your user preferences to turn off this warning. But, for some versions of the WikEd editor, available from your user preferences "Gadgets" tab, you will lose any unsaved changes.) You simply use the back (left) arrow on your browser to return safely to your edit page after testing the link from a preview pane.

Improving an article's quality with wikilinks opens up a new kind of grammar for online editors, and eventually leads to understanding disambiguation, and redirection. Please note that on Wikipedia, editing any page to see how linking or any wikitext works is a always a very safe, and encouraged operation.

Normally, Wikipedia doesn't start a new line when you press the Enter key. If you press the Enter key twice, Wikipedia will start a new paragraph. To force a single new line (for instance, when you want to insert a poem) insert the HTML element <br /> after the line.

First off, please don't blank articles (remove all the text from them). Such changes will most likely get reverted soon afterwards, so they are pointless, too.

The procedure for deletions is

Wikipedia's software can produce a list of all the changes between two versions of an article (either between two consecutive versions, or between an old and the current version), laid out in two-columns side by side with changes highlighted (here's an example. From the Recent Changes page you can click the "diff" link; from an article page itself click "Page history", then "cur" or "last" to see changes.

To see the differences between two arbitrary versions of an article, see Wikipedia:URLs.