SubSurfWiki:Training/Navigating

There are three main ways users explore the content of a wiki:
 * Searching, most often from the Search box, top left of every page.
 * Clicking links in an article, or perhaps using Gadget-Navigation_popups.
 * Browsing Help:Categories like a directory, perhaps from a portal.

There are other ways to find content, though they are less often used, and depend on being implemented by editors. For example:
 * Browsing from a Navbox, usually in one of a set of related articles.
 * Browsing from the link tree in What links here, e.g. WhatLinksHere/Spectral decomposition
 * Clicking links in dynamically generated content, such as a Dynamic Page Listing or Semantic MediaWiki query.

Search
The Search box tries to find content as soon as you start typing. Click on Containing... link to do a literal search.

Search tips from Wikipedia
The following features can be used to refine searches. Many of these links are a search link. (Search link is not guaranteed to exactly emulate the search box.)


 * Phrases in double quotes — A phrase can be found by enclosing it in double quotes, "like this" . Double quotes can define a single search term that contains spaces. For example, ' where the space is a character, differs much from ' where the space is interpreted as a logical AND.
 * Boolean search — All major search engines support the " - " character for "logical not", the AND, the OR, and the grouping parenthesis. Logical OR can be specified by spelling it out (in capital letters); the AND operator is assumed for all terms (separated by spaces), but spelling out AND is equivalent. Parentheses are a necessary feature because (blue OR red) AND green differs from blue OR (red AND green).
 * Exclusion — Terms can be excluded by prefixing a dash ( - ), which is "logical not". For example while -refining -unwanted search results . For example  finds all articles with payment and card, but not "credit card".
 * Wildcard search — A wildcard character *, standing for any length of character-string can prefix or suffix a word or string: *like will return "childlike" and "dream-like"; this* , returns results like "thistle". For example, the query  lists articles like Kazakhstan and Afghanistan.
 * Search fuzzily — Spelling relaxation occurs by suffixing a tilde ( ~ ) like this~, with results like "thus" and "thins". For example, searching for  would return James Watt, James Wyatt, and James Watts. A mnemonic: -ish.
 * Search results! — Prefixing a tilde ~like this query always gives search results, never jumping to a single title. It functions as the keyboard shortcut to clicking on the "containing" option. For example,  finds pages with the misspelling, instead of being redirected to Similarity. Making tilde the first character disables a redirect. There will be no disambiguation page, no article, no single page as a result.  A mnemonic: "wave of "

Links
There are a few tricks to know with links (and there's more in Wikipedia:Help:Wiki_markup:
 * A regular link to an article is easy. When an article links to itself, it appears in bold:.
 * You rarely need to style a link, but if you do, put the styling outside the link: article.
 * You can also link to articles, articled, etc. This is why article names should be singular.
 * You can rename a link, but avoid is if possible because it can be confusing for the reader. Changing seismic analysis to analyze seismic is a good use of renaming.
 * Adding a pipe to the end of a link simplifies it automatically, for example removing the namespace and/or disambiguation. Try linking to an article.
 * External links get made automatically from a URL: http://www.agilegeoscience.com/journal/2013/6/14/eage-2013-in-a-nutshell.html
 * You can tidy them up and give them link text. Avoid language like click here, just use natural language.
 * Sometimes you want to avoid the little link icon (avoid doing this)
 * You can link to certain other wikis easily, and this is especially handy for linking to Wikipedia. Note that these look like internal links.
 * Take care linking to categories — you need a colon to avoid simply adding the page to the category, like so Geophysics
 * Some things are linked automatically, e.g. ISBN 978-0987959409
 * Link an image: [[file:example.jpg|32px|link=Article]] or stop it linking to itself with link=. Or link to the file's page: file:example.jpg.

Links are the reason we avoid underlining or coloring text in the wiki.

Categories

 * To improve findability, all articles should be in a category.
 * Avoid deep nesting of categories — a category should probably not have fewer than about 20 members. Don't make them speculatively ('we will want it one day').
 * Adding category is easy: add    at the very bottom of the page (because that's where the categories render).
 * Add as many categories to a page as you think you need.
 * Sometimes we'd like to hide a category, e.g. if it's really just for administrators; just add   to the category page.
 * Categories can be members of categories, if it makes logical sense.
 * If you create a new category, add a short description of what should be in the category to the category page.
 * It's often convenient to make a template categorize pages on which it appears. Simply add the category to the template inside   tags (otherwise the template itself will be added to the category too.
 * You can categorize templates, but add the category tag to the /doc page, not the template page. It will add the category when it is transcluded.

Read more about categorization in Wikipedia:Categorization.