After publishing yesterday's post on how to create a wiki in SharePoint, I realized that I had only told part of the story. Yes, I detailed exactly how one goes about creating a wiki site in SharePoint, but I pretty much left you high and dry at that point. As they say in rustic circles, "my bad."
The specific realization that occurred to me after the fact was that it's all well and good to demonstrate how to create a wiki, but providing some helpful starting points as to how to actually use that wiki might also be appreciated by folks who are unfamiliar with the form. So let's begin with what your newly created wiki site is going to look like "out of the box," which should be something like this:
To save you from squinting at the text in the image above, here's how wiki sites are defined in SharePoint:
Wikiwiki means quick in Hawaiian. A wiki site is a Web site in which users can easily edit any page. The site grows organically by linking existing pages together or by creating links to new pages. If a user finds a link to an uncreated page, he or she can follow the link and create the page.
In business environments, a wiki site provides a low-maintenance way to record knowledge. Information that is usually traded in e-mail messages, gleaned from hallway conversations, or written on paper can instead be recorded in a wiki site, in context with similar knowledge.
Other example uses of wiki sites include brainstorming ideas, collaborating on designs, creating an instruction guide, gathering data from the field, tracking call center knowledge, and building an encyclopedia of knowledge.
Note that there is a How to Use this Wiki Site hyperlink in the Quick Launch bar as pictured above. If you're entirely new to wikis, this link is going to be your best friend, as it's one of the best help areas I've yet seen embedded within SharePoint, including sections on Editing wiki pages, Creating links, Creating pages, Managing your wiki site, and more. It's chock full of great stuff.
To get you started though, here are a few of the basics, along with a tip that I picked up at the Mindsharp Power End User summit.
On the Home page (as shown in the image above), click the Edit button in the upper right to get started with editing the page. You'll see that the existing/default Home page content (as shown below) will be present inside a WYSIWIG editor, along with a full toolbar for editing that default content. It's within this editor that you'll be overwriting the existing, introductory content and replacing it with your own content:
The first thing you may want to do is rename your Home page to something more descriptive, such as Team Planning Wiki. To do so, simply type your desired title into the input field for Name by replacing the default name of Home (as shown in the image above) with the name of your choosing.
To hyperlink to an existing wiki page from another wiki page on your site, you would reference it in the WYSIWIG editor by enclosing the page name to be linked to inside of double brackets, e.g., [[page name to be linked to]].
If you don't want the actual page name to appear as the link text, however, there are a couple of different ways to have that link text appear differently, but only one of them is covered in the How to Use this Wiki Site instructions. The tip I have to share here is that the secondary method of altering the link text involves clicking the Wiki Pages hyperlink in your breadcrumb:
Clicking that WIki Pages link will render a list of all of the wiki pages on the site. From that list of wiki pages, right-click on the name of the page to which you want to link, and select the Copy Shortcut menu item. Then, navigate back to edit the wiki page where the link to that page should go, place your cursor accordingly, click the link icon in the toolbar and, on the resulting Insert Hyperlink popup, paste the URL of the shortcut you just copied into the Address input field and type your desired link text in the Text to display field:
And with that, I've now shared everything I've learned to date about wikiing in SharePoint. Will I learn more in the future? Stay tuned, and we'll find out together!
Posted
Oct 23 2008, 04:20 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Bamboo Nation's de facto managing editor and, while he has learned much about SharePoint in his first year, he gleefully awaits the release of SharePoint 2010, and the reset button that release will represent for SharePoint Blank.