Navigating the Growing the Commons knowledge base

It's helpful for everyone consulting this wiki to get to know how to get around the site. There are several ways round that anyone can use, and if you are a curator it is worth being familiar with all of them, as this will help you to help others, as well as yourself.

On the “start” page there are (currently) 14 groups of topics. Clicking on any of these takes you to the page for that group, where all the topics in that group are displayed. Note that in some cases, a topic is in more than one group.

Every topic has, at the top of the page, a link back to the group (or groups) it is part of.

At the very top of the window, there is a very obvious search box. Type some text into the search box and click on the button .

The results are given in two lists:

1. “Matching pagenames:” — next to the page name in parenthesis, is the part of the wiki (the “namespace”) that the page is in.
2. “Fulltext results:” listing all the occurrences of what is in the search box, in all pages on the wiki. This list may naturally be very long, particularly if you have chosen a common word! They are listed by pagename, and you can click on the pagename to go to that page. Next to the page name, after @, the part of the wiki (“namespace”) that the page is in. Click on that to get all the results in that part of the wiki.

If you enjoy looking through a long list, we have a list of all topic introductions. Happy browsing! Each topic has its own separate part of the wiki, which in DokuWiki is called a “namespace”. As the wiki develops, we expect that some topic curators will add more pages into their topic namespace, and they will be listed on that topic's introduction page.

If you click on the spanner icon, just to the right of the search box, half way down the menu that appears, you will be able to see the word, 'Sitemap'. Click there, and you will get a list of the abbreviations we use for each part of the wiki (“namespace”). Click on any one of these to see the pages in that namespace. This is a comprehensive list of all pages that you have permission to read, including and going beyond the list of topic introductions.

At the very top of the page, but under the site logo and search box, there is a list of page names — these are ones that you have visited. This makes it very easy to go back to something you saw recently.

The term 'backlinks' means the reverse of the normal kind of links that take you from one page to another. Backlinks show you which other pages link to the one you are on, and they are a common feature in most wikis.

Below the Edit, and the Old Revisions buttons, there is the Backlinks button, with icon: . When you click this, you get a new screen listing all the pages with links to the one you are on. If you click on any of those links, you will go to that page, and you should be able to find the link to the page you started from.