SubSurfWiki:Training/Making the wiki work for you

For a complete list of wiki editing tools, see Wikipedia's Editing tools article.

Stay on top of new content

 * Watch pages your are interested in, and visit them when notified.
 * Watch categories you are interested in.
 * Keep a list of pages you really care about on your user page, and patrol or revisit them occasionally.
 * As an alternative to using MediaWiki's watchlist, You could send a feed of pages to Outlook, Yammer, or some other feed reader. Note that the reader must be able to 'see' the wiki, so services based outside a firewall, for example, won't work.

Better editors
How much you can do here depends on how much control you have over your computing environment, for example being able to install software. But there is a large number of tools that can help with editing, providing useful features like markup highlighting, search and replace, and so on. Some of the most widely used aids:
 * Extensions for various text editors (e.g. emacs)
 * wikEd — a JavaScript editor add-on with lots of functions, including search and replace
 * AutoWikiBrowser — a specialized browser for Windows

Other tools
Navigation popups are a mouseover box containing the first paragraph of an article. It also allows quick access to common editing operations. If the wiki provides the NavPop gadget, it can be enabled in user preferences under the gadgets tab. Otherwise, it can be installed by editing the user's User:Name/vector.js file, if this is permitted in your wiki (if you're using a different skin than Vector, change the name of the JavaScript file).

Other ways to get more from wikis

 * Use the wiki as a notebook, for example using date-indexed subpages of your user page, e.g. Special:MyPage/2013/06/20
 * Store data in the wiki with Semantic MediaWiki properties. It's probably a good idea to only do this with data that would be a interest to most users of the wiki.
 * Get involved in Wikipedia or some other public wiki project — it is desperately short of editors, and it's getting more desperate every year. Your new skills are needed!
 * Wikis are very easy to install and maintain on your own computer or server, especially if you're on a Linux machine or a Mac. Installing MediaWiki gets easier with every release.
 * There are other wikis besides MediaWiki too. For example, check out TiddlyWiki for a wiki in a single file. Store it in your Dropbox and you're good to go! You can even share it with others.
 * If you want your own MediaWiki wiki on the web, it's very easy, and free, to stand up your own Amazon server with MediaWiki already running on it. See, for example, the distribution by Bitnami.
 * An even easier solution is to use a wiki 'farm' like Wikia.