This is a wiki — a web site designed to encourage you to contribute to it.

You can edit almost any page on this wiki. Try it out now, in the Sand Box (a place where no-one will mind if you make a mess).

While you’re editing, you can write a phrase that links to another wiki page, new or old, by writing the page’s name with a dot at the beginning or somewhere in the middle (like this: Wombats or Cute Wombats).

If you need to use a word which contains a dot but you don’t want it to be a link to a page, precede it with two dots, like this: Cute Wombats. (Summary: one dot before a word turns it into a link, and two dots prevents it from being a link.)

You may be used to using wikis which make page links using Camel Case instead of dots (like this: Cute Wombats). You can do that in this wiki too. See Camel Case Plays Nicely With Dots.

Please sign what you write, preferably by typing your name as a link like this: Willow Rosenberg. That will let people know who’s said what, and as a nice side-effect it will automatically give you a wiki home page that’s easy for people to find.

For sociological arguments about how wikis work, see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorks.

To see what people have written in this wiki recently, look at Recent Changes.

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Access Keys

In most web browsers, you can use a special key — usually Alt or ctrl — along with the initial letter of one of IoWiki’s buttons to activate that button. Try it, by pressing Alt-e and ctrl-e.

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Mark-Up Codes

The rest of this page describes the mark-up codes you can use to posh up your pages a bit. These codes are deliberately restricted to things that are semantically useful, not too distracting, and not too arty. (Arty is good, but it discourages collaboration, so it’s not good here. See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyDoesntWikiDoHtml for arguments about this sort of issue.)

_text_ to have     text emphasised, _like this_. 

*text* to have     text displayed in bold, *like this*. 

{[red text ]} to have     text displayed in {[red red ]}, and similarly for all these colours: 

{[green green ]} {[blue blue ]} {[olive fawn ]} [[crimson crimson ]] {[red red ]} {[purple purple ]} {[lime lime ]} {[orange orange ]} {[pink pink ]} {[black black ]}.

To make a list of dot points, start lines with hyphens, like this:

- dot point, wrapping with the correct indentation when it takes up more than one line in the browser window as this example probably demonstrates 

to get this:

• dot point, wrapping with the correct indentation when it takes up more than one line in the browser window as this example probably demonstrates

Similarly, start a paragraph with -> to have it indented but without a dot:

->indented paragraph, wrapping with the correct indentation when it takes up more than one line in the browser window as this example probably demonstrates

You can use —, —, —> and —> to get extra levels of indenting.

Any web hyperlinks you type (<<http://tumble.tk,>> Jason@xeny.net, etc.) are automatically hot-linked. If the hyperlink points to a picture, the picture is shown in the page, like this:

http://www.geocities.com/falconfacts/pics/ebphotos/eba1.jpg

Turning off mark-up codes

Use [[[(]]]text[[[)]]] to have text displayed without any of the above mark-up. This is useful when you want to use characters like * and _ which you don’t want to disappear, and when you don’t want a word in Camel Case to be linked to anything.

Use [[[(]]]code text[[[)]]] to have text displayed without mark-up and in a typewriter font suitable for computer code, like this.

Use [[[(]]]pre text[[[)]]] to have text displayed without mark-up, in a typewriter font and with spaces and tabs preserved. This is useful for formatted tables and formatted computer code.

Character set

If your browser and operating system allow it, you can use any Unicode character with IoWiki, in one of three ways: by typing it straight in, by copy and pasting it from somewhere, or using HTML character codes. For the third method, see H T M L Markup Codes.

Here are some example characters. How they look will depend on what fonts you’re using. ☺☃☆❡φ∴Ⅽↀↂ⌘←→↑↓❈♪☁●

And there are easy ways of typing in the following special characters: — for — — for — ” for ” ” for ”

Oh, and bits of text in triple square brackets [[[like this]]] may give unpredictable results, so try to avoid them, OK?

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This wiki is run using Io Wiki.

Jason Grossman