This website is what is called a “wiki”. What does that mean, you ask? A wiki is just an easier way of creating a web site where users can create their page easily, without having to know any web markup language or having to upload pages to a server. New pages are created “on the fly”, just by making a link to them or (this way is even easier) doing a search for the name of the new page that you want in the search box.

Marking up the page to make things bold or italic or to create links is way simpler in a wiki. Here is that same sentence as you would type it in on this website.

//Marking up// the page to make things **bold** or //italic//
or to create [[wiki:help|links]] is //**way**// simpler in a wiki.

For a complete tutorial on the wiki commands to do all this, please go to the syntax page. Don't worry, if you forget any of this, there is a link to the syntax when you edit a page!

If you just want to practice, you can go to the playground and play around all you want.

In the old way of creating a website, you had to have FTP access to a webserver and you had to create new pages by typing them into an editor and use all the fancy HTML codes to make your information look like a web page. Then you had to upload the page to the server and check it in your browser to make sure it worked. This site is a lot different than that! To create a page, you have two choices.

For this example, let's say user “bob” is editing an existing page (like the start page). He wants to make a new page to tell the world about himself (a User Page), so on the current page he simply creates a link to the user:bob page (we'll talk about User Pages and site areas later). Wait a minute! That page doesn't exist yet! Why would we want a link to a non-existing page! Wait and see, my friend….

This is the start page.  It is really boring.  Hey everyone, why don't
you go to [[user:bob|my user page]] and check it out!

When bob saves the current page, it ends up looking like this:

This is the start page. It is really boring. Hey everyone, why don't you go to my user page and check it out!

You can click that link if you want. If no one else has already been there and created the page, it will be empty and you can create it by clicking the “Create this page” button.

This way is even easier! See the little “Search” box at the top of the page? Type the title of your new page in there, and like in the example above, if that page doesn't exist, you can create it yourself with the “Create This Page” button. Of course, none of the other pages in the site will link to it, so unless you plan to link to it soon, no on ewill be able to read it!