QRG - Editing Page Content

Table of Contents

Adding and editing content on the wiki is comparable to using a simple word processor and does not require any knowledge of html or other web page issues. Those interested in full help might view the help pages from Atlassian, the developer of the Confluence application the runs the PIUG wiki. See articles on Adding Pages and Using the editor and others from the Confluence Documentation.

Editing

1. The editor is very close to WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") as of the upgrade to Confluence 4 on September 17, 2012. There is just one entry box plus a Preview function. The three separate tabs (Rich Text, Wiki Markup, and Preview) in the editor of Confluence 3 are gone. Now just create your formatted text and check it out as appropriate with Preview. It is still possible to use Wiki Markup; if you care, see Confluence 4 Editor - What's Changed for Wiki Markup Users. 
2. New pages, forum topics, comments, blog posts, and attachments will result by default in a full-content email notification message going to wiki users who are watching the space, forum and/or page except with the possible exception of the author. To be notified of one's own content changes, users must set the option available via the top menubar: Settings...Manage my Email Notifications...Notify me on my own Postings. All pages and blog posts with new or edited content will also be listed in the "Daily Update" that goes to all registered wiki users by default. See the Watching Spaces, Forums, and Pages quick reference guide for further information.
3. Users can control whether an altering email message goes out for an edited page or blog post by checking the "Notify watchers" box below the edit box towards the right side of the page. Indeed, users are strongly encouraged to un check this box to avoid blasting users with low-value email. Links to edited pages will appear in the "Daily Digest" regardless. At this time, there is no "notify watchers" box for editing comments or attaching documents, something that has been requested in the Confluence developers forum.
4. There are two types of "comments" that apply to wiki pages; comments added while editing pages and comments that are part of discussions. (a) The more obscure but equally important involves the comment box provided under the text edit box when one edits a wiki page. Users should always add a brief summary or explanation about the new content or changes on an edited page. These comments appear at the top of alerting email messages and in the page history. (b) Most people think of the comments that are "replies" made to a discussion forum topic or are appended to any wiki page. While such replies are "the discussion" in a forum, they are often less appropriate for knowledge or resource pages. In the latter case, the user should generally just edit the page content and update the information in the flow of the page rather than risking it being missed as an appendage to the main content. Similarly, users should generally edit their own words and not provide comments to themselves. Users may annotate the new content with a time and date stamp or other indication if necessary to distinguish original content from the new.
5. The biggest formatting and linking problem seems to come from the wiki editor adding "&nbsp\;" (no-break-space) characters randomly instead of a regular "space" in the text, thereby sometimes breaking links that should have been correct. It seems to happen on the Rich Text tab when you take a break from fluid typing. At other times, it just adds an extra space but then shows up as "&nbsp\;" in the excerpt in the PIUG-DF or PIUG Blog summary listings on the PIUG space home page or the main PIUG-DF page. If you manually delete it, be sure to actually add back a space or your text still won't look right. This is a quirk of the wiki editor and may be addressed in future software upgrades. Occasionally the editor will do other funny things, such as putting a star where an asterisk was supposed to be.
6. Be careful pasting text into the wiki editor Rich Text tab from Microsoft Word or other word processors which can leave residual formatting code at the top of the page. Avoid this either by (1) using a text editor as the source of your pasted information or (2) editing the content in the Wiki Markup to remove the offending formatting code before saving the page.
7. In the wiki markup tabs, some special characters cause text formatting when pairs of them precede and follow text without intervening spaces: * bold-face , _ underscore, - strike-through, and + italics. Therefore, add a space after these characters if you want them to show up as real characters.
8. For other formatting help such as making bullets, numbered lists or tables within the wiki format tab, refer to the wiki markup "Help Tips" that show up under the Location window when you are using the Wiki Markup tab and also the Full Notation Guide linked therefrom.
9. In the wiki markup tab, backslashes are your friends. They make sure that characters are taken literally. For example, double-hyphens are an ndash, triple hyphens are an mdash, and quadruple hyphens are a horizontal line. If you really wanted double, triple or quadruple hyphens, you would have to precede each with a backslash in the wiki markup text. This extra backslash is not necessary when working in the Rich Text tab because they are added automatically "behind the scene." Similarly, left and right square brackets have meaning in wiki markup, so to see the "real" characters, you would preceded each with a backslash in wiki markup.
10. Upload up to six attachments at once so that watch users are alerted only once for the existence of new attachments on the page.
11. Use "anchors" to be able to link to a particular point on a page. For example, if you put {anchor:startpoint}} within a called PIUG:Target Page, then you could send the user directly to that point with a link on the sending page that looks like this in Wiki Markup: [Goto to Start Point on Target Page|PIUG:Target Page#startpoint]. See the Working with Anchors help page.
12. Practice in the Sandbox space on existing pages and create your own.

Where to put your content

First person content => If you are contributing and expect to write in first person ("I") and do not want people editing your content even if it is incorrect, then find the right Discussion Forum to post your topic in. We encourage every user to avoid editing other people's discussion forum postings. Users may restrict edit rights to their forum topics when they are concerned about them being editing. If content is changed, please contact a wiki administrator to have the original version restored.

Third person content => If you are contributing factual content for the overall benefit of the wiki community and are not going to write in first person and are not concerned about others editing your content for the benefit of all, then find or create a non-forum wiki page. As described in point 3b under Editing above, users should update and improve the content of such pages directly as opposed to appending a comment to the page.

The location in the page hierarchy, as indicated by the Navigation section in the left side panel, can be changed during initial page creation or afterward. To do this while editing a page, go to the location area of the page just below the "Minor Change" box and then drag-and-drop the page title to the target spot in the hierarchy.

Spell Check

The Confluence wiki application does not come with spell check. However, a Confluence wiki entry suggests Google Toolbar spell check for either IE or Firefox, or Spellbound for Firefox:

Google toolbar
Firefox: http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/
IE: http://toolbar.google.com;

Spellbound for Firefox
http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/

Google spell check does indeed allow the user to find errors in content edit windows and even offers suggestions.

Labels

Assign labels to all content. Labels are keywords that are useful for finding content via Label Clouds found on the home page of each space.