Creating and deleting pages

First, to say that permissions for creating and deleting are restricted to certain user groups, and certain namespaces, as part of the site rules, to help avoid problems. If you find you are not allowed to create or delete something that you think you should be able to, please ask the wiki team for the required permission.

The quickest way to create a new page is to change the URL in the URL bar. So, for example, if you're looking at this page right now, you will see something like knowledge.growingthecommons.org/doku.php/doc/creating_and_deleting_pages If I wanted to create a new page in the doc namespace, I would just replace creating_and_deleting_pages with the new filename I wanted to create.

However, depending on the permissions you have, you may well not be allowed to create a page in the doc namespace, but we have set up a test namespace where you are more likely to be able to. You can go to the test start page now if you like. But you don't have to be there: you can just replace doc/creating_and_deleting_pages with test/my_new_test or something like that. Then when you hit return, you will get a message

This topic does not exist yet

Nothing happened Not yet! That's to let you consider whether you really want to go ahead with this! Just under the “This topic does not exist yet”, you will see

You've followed a link to a topic that doesn't exist yet. If permissions allow, you may create it by clicking on Create this page.

And the icon for “Create this page” is the pencil-plus one: .

Lo and behold! The edit screen will come up, with a template guiding you to fill in the page. When you're ready, click on “Save” and there is your page! Now you are ready to carry on editing and saving your edits …

If it was just a test, then be nice and delete all the content on the page, and Save again, to remove the page.

An alternative is to write a link to the page you want from a page you already can edit. So, on this page, I can edit the page, add [[test:test_page_by_Simon]] anywhere, and that will shows up as what should be a red link: test_page_by_Simon. If you click on that link, you get the same page:

This topic does not exist yet

and you follow on exactly as above. But, please in this case, don't create the page! Do it for one of your own choice.

As we've seen just above, I created a link to a page that doesn't exist. If you are ready to create that page, go ahead and click on the link; and follow on as above.

If your permissions allow, there is just one simple way to delete a page. Go to editing the page, select all the content in the page, and delete it. (On many systems, you can select all with Ctrl-A, then press Del or whatever your Delete key is.) Then save, and your page has disappeared!

If you try to create a page that did exist but has been deleted, instead of “This topic does not exist yet” you will get the message:

This page does not exist anymore

and, underneath that,

You've followed a link to a page that no longer exists. You can check the list of Old revisions to see when and why it was deleted, access old revisions or restore it.

So, if you click on the “Old revisions” button you can see a list of previous versions. Click on one of those to see what it was. If you then “Save”, the page will be restored!