Hey, I don't read documentation, either, but if you skim through this page you'll have 75% of what you know to work in the wiki. Have at it!
A wiki is a website that's editable by anyone who reads it (in our case, anyone who's a member of the department). The most important thing to remember is that you can't hurt anything -- pages can always be restored to old versions even if you mess them up -- so be bold and feel free to make mistakes.
Finding your way.
Each page has a name (this page is called GettingStarted) -- and lives in a group. Pretty much everything lives in the Main group -- this page is in that group, as you can tell by looking at the title bar above -- and technically the name of the page is Main/GettingStarted or Main.GettingStarted, but for simplicity GettingStarted works just fine. To get back to the home page, click "Main" at top or the "eh" at top right.
The links in the green bar above will let you perform actions on whatever page you're viewing: most obviously, you can edit it, or you can see the history of changes, or you can get a printer-friendly version.
Editing pages.
You can, and should, edit any page whenever the mood strikes you or you see something that needs to be changed. When you try to edit a page, you'll be asked to log in; ask Greg if you don't have a password or it doesn't work.
Wiki pages use a simple mark-up language, which means that simple text indicators are translated into formatting rules. For example, if you enter '''bold''', you get bold, and if you enter [[Seminar]], you get a link to Seminar. It's wicked easy. (Click "Edit Page" above to see what the markup on this page looks like.)
For basic editing help and a list of markup codes, check BasicEditing. It's also linked from the HomePage, and sometimes it's useful to have it open in a separate window for reference.
To create a new page, just make a link to it on any existing page, like this: Newpage. Then you click the link to edit it. (But if you edit our sample page, then it won't be a good demonstration any more, so please make a new one with a different name!)
Uploading.
The easiest way to upload a document is to create a link to it first. Links to uploaded documents start with "Attach:" -- no brackets required -- so Attach:filename.jpg is a link to an uploaded file called filename.jpg.
If you create a link to a file that's not yet uploaded, and then save your page, the wiki will show you that the file doesn't yet exist by making the link red: for example, Attach:gregspresentation.ppt
should be red with a little paper clip. Now, click on that red link, and you'll be prompted to upload the file (which will be renamed accordingly).
Practice.
You can practice editing pages in the WikiSandbox. Be bold -- you can't hurt anything!
Pasting tables from Word and Excel.
Want to paste in a table from Excel? There are two ways to do it.
Simplest (but lamest), you can copy/paste the cells, and then put a space in front of each one, and then add spaces to them to get them to look the way you want them to look. Lines with a space in front of them will retain the spacing in the wiki, like this:
1/26/07 Jean van Seventer Basics of Innate immunity 2/2/07 Dave Sherr Basics of Adaptive Immunology
A better way is to make a nice little table. Copy the cells from Excel (or Word). Now Edit the wiki page, and paste the cells in. Now go to the top of the editing box, and click the little "excel" icon, last in the row of icons. This will convert the table into a little wiki-format table. Now you can save it.
| 1/26/07 | Jean van Seventer | Basics of Innate immunity |
| 2/2/07 | Dave Sherr | Basics of Adaptive Immunology |
The wiki-format table is a little harder to read, but it looks nice, and it's easy to edit. Cells are separated by two vertical lines. You can edit the table to your heart's content (and don't worry about the formatting; as long as the vertical lines are there, pmwiki will figure it out).