IGNOU Wiki Support and FAQ

Please see wikipedia's help page for extensive documentation on using Wiki's editing functions.

Q: How do we make tables?

See Wikipedia's documentation on using tables

Q: How do we indent?

A colon (:) indents a line or paragraph.

A newline after that starts a new paragraph. This is often used for discussion on talk pages.

A colon (:) indents a line or paragraph.

A newline after that starts a new paragraph.
This is often used for discussion on talk pages.

We use 1 colon to indent once.

We use 2 colons to indent twice.

We use 3 colons to indent 3 times, and so on.

Here is how the above indents look in action:

We use 1 colon to indent once.

We use 2 colons to indent twice.

We use 3 colons to indent 3 times, and so on.

Q: How do we show external images?

Important Note: Keep in mind that displaying images on your site using another server's bandwidth without permission is considered bad netiquette. If you don't have permission you should upload any images to the wiki before you display them.

You should be able to link to external images just by including the url of the image in your wiki page. If this doesn't work, you should contact your wiki administrator and ask them to set $wgAllowExternalImages = true; in LocalSettings.php.

Q: Where can we find images that do not have any copyright restrictions?

Wikipedia's sister project, Wikimedia Commons, contains images that are free content, that is they can be used by anyone for any purpose.

Q: How do I position images to the left or right of the Wiki page?

See the Wikipedia documentation on image positioning.

Q: How do we copy and paste MS Word documents to a Wiki page?

One option is to use Word2MediaWikiPlus Converter. Word2MediaWikiPlus Converter is a word macro that will convert Word documents into MediaWiki-friendly syntax, preserving your Word document text formatting in MediaWiki.

You can find a demonstration here.

Installation instructions:

• Word2MediaWikiPlus Converter installation instruction are here.

Q: How do we change the colour of text?

To change text color use the syntax:

<span style="color: #FF0000">Red Text</span>

or

<span style="color: red">Red Text</span>

Which will look like:

 Red Text

Q: How do we create a new page without linking from an existing page?

Important Note: The best idea when working with Wikis is to create a page by first linking from an existing page rather than creating a page that is not linked from anywhere. The reason for this is that a page that is not linked from anywhere is likely to be lost to most users and unlikely to see very much participation.

If you must create a new page that isn't linked from another page, see Wikipedia's 'creating new pages' help article on starting new pages through the url.

Q: Under what license do my contributions to Wikieducator content appear?

All content that you contribute to Wikieducator will be free content. More on free and open content can be found at freedomdefined.org. Wikieducator uses the Creative Commons license with attribution and share alike requirements which meets the requirements of the free content definition.

Q: How do I change the title of a page

Q: Say in Bamboo I want to change the Course 1 Unit 4 to Block 1 Unit 1?.... do I have to create a new page and copy contents. Thats all I can think of.

After you have logged in, you will see a tab labeled 'move' at the top of each page. You can use that tab to rename the currently displayed page. To rename the page, click the 'move' tab and fill in the input labeled "To new title" and then click the 'Move page' button. The page will now be under the new name and links/references to the old name will be redirected.

Q: How do we get the 'links' on top of a new page?

When I created an unlinked page and created a new link from it, the new page did not automatically show link to the previous page. How can I get that?

In the current software, the links at the top of the page that show pages linking to the current page, are not created automatically. They are created when you name your page.

If you wanted to create a newPage that links from Bamboo and Rattan and contains the relationship to it, as well as displaying the link to it at the top of the page, you can write the link like this:

[[Bamboo and Rattan/newPage]]

The link will display like this:

Bamboo and Rattan/newPage

If you wanted to display just the name of the newPage link without the parent (in this case Bamboo and Rattan) section of the name you can use this notation:

[[Bamboo_and_Rattan/newPage|newPage]]

So that the link will display as:

newPage

Q: How do you get/not get contents on top of page?

The contents will appear automatically on the top of the page if you have used headlines in the content of your page. You can make any text in your wiki page content into a headline by using the headline syntax which is more than one '='.

== This text == will display the largest possible headline. Adding more '=' (e.g. === Headline text ===) will create progressively smaller headlines, but they will also be shown in the table of contents.

If you would like to manually display the table of contents of a page somewhere you can use the wiki syntax __TOC__ wherever you want it to be displayed (notice there are two underscores before and after TOC).

Q: On use of templates

When I use a template, say for activities, as I have tried to do on the main Bamboo and rattan page, how do I get the complete activity into the box?

A guide to using templates can be found here.

Q: Forum

On forum, there are two 'views' on a comment I posted; how do I access them?

The number of views indicates the number of times someone has read your comment. If you would like to see how many times someone has replied to your comment with a comment of their own, that number will be listed in the 'Replies' column.

To view the replies to your comment, click on the topic title.