New pages

Creating a new page is just an extension of creating an internal link. First you create an internal link to a page that does not yet exist, then you edit the new page to add the desired content.

Creating new pages

To create a page, first think about where you might want your page to be linked from. Say you want to create a page for your new Chemistry course. Ideally, there should be a link to this course from a page listing all the Chemistry courses. The Chemistry courses page should be linked to the science courses page, and so on. This way new pages can always be found.

But you say, my new page does not exist yet; how can I create a link to it! No problem for the wiki software. Making a link to a non-existent wiki page is nearly the same as making a link to an existing wiki page <smile>; just use what you learned in the previous section. Making a new page can be a difficult concept to grasp at the start, but once you see how it works it should become perfectly clear.

In the previous section, you learned about making internal links between wiki pages using the Insert/Edit Link button on the Rich Editor toolbar. We use this same Insert/Edit Link button to create new pages.

Let's go back to our earlier example: your new Chemistry course page. To create this new page, you would navigate to and edit the page listing all of the Chemistry courses, adding a link to your new Chemistry page — even though your page has not been made yet. After saving your changes, a red-coloured link would display. When you click on the new link, you would be given the opportunity to create the new page.

Tip: If you want to create a page but you are not sure of the best place in the wiki to link your new page from, create a link from your User page. You can always add the link to the appropriate page at a later stage. This way you will not have difficulty finding the page you created.

Step 1: Create a link to a nonexistent page

Creating a link to a page that does not yet exist is the first step to creating a new page. Try the following activity to see how easy it is.

Activity

New page link If you've been working through these tutorials progressing from one to the next, you already created your first new page when you added a link to your sandbox on your User page. Let's have a go at creating a booklist page of your recent reads. Go to your user page. Click on the edit tab and enable the Rich Editor (if it is not enabled). Type a description for your new page e.g. "My Booklist". Highlight the description of your new page that you just typed. Click on the Insert/Edit Link button in the Rich Editor toolbar. The Link dialog box displays. Link dialog box showing new page name in the Link text field Type "/My booklist" in the Link text field in the Link dialog box. Click the OK button on the dialog box. The link should appear as blue and underlined in the editing window and red in the preview area. Click the Save page button if you are satisfied with your link to a new page.

Tip: In the above activity the "/" in front of "My booklist" indicates to the wiki that the page is under (subordinate to) the user page. This eliminates the risk that your content will be overwritten by another user who works through this activity. Another option is to use your username in the page name. For example, you could use Username My Booklist as the page name (where Username is the name listed on the link above the editing window for your userpage) and it should not be overwritten by others working on this tutorial.

Step 2: Add content to the empty page

When you click on the red-coloured link to your new page, a message and an edit window display, as shown in the following image.

When you've accessed a page that doesn't yet exist, this message along with an edit window will display.

The following activity continues the process of creating a new page which you began in step 1.

Activity

Creating a new page Go to your user page. Find the red-coloured description of your new page (e.g. "My Booklist"). Click on the red link to begin the process. A page displays with a message that the page you accessed does not yet exist, and offering an edit window with which to create the page. Type your content in the "box" (edit window) as indicated in the message, e.g., type "Content coming soon ..." or start making your list of books. Click the Save page button when you are satisfied with your creation. Your newly created page is now published. Go to your user page. The link to your new page should now appear blue.

Congratulations, you are now well on your way to creating useful content in the wiki.

New pages without a link

It is possible (but not advisable) to create a page before you make a link to it. Simply type the name of the desired page onto the end of the http://wikieducator.org/ in the address bar of your browser, like this http://wikieducator.org/Tea and hit enter. This will take you to a page called Tea and prompt you with the option to create the Tea page as shown below.

An example of a page, accessed via URL, that does not exist yet

Key points

We recommend creating a link to the new page before creating it. If you plan to create new pages without links, please make sure you think about how you name them because they might get lost in the sea of wiki pages. A typical format for a page name is wikieducator.org <slash> User:Username <slash> name of page desired, which might translate to wikieducator.org/User:XXXX/nameofpagedesired. A good place to look for lost pages is on your User contributions page. Click on the my contributions link, located at the top of every page and to the left of the log out link, to access your contributions.

Summary

Creating a link to your new page is important. Not only will it be easy to find the next time you log in but it will be connected in some way to the other pages in WikiEducator which will foster collaboration. Spend some time thinking about good places from which to link to your new page before you begin. The search box on the left navigator or this projects page may be useful for finding phrases and material where you might want to add a link.

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