wiki editing

[xPANCAKEx]

how easy is it to 'pick up' on editing/creating a wiki

like what sort of time scale would it take to learn the basics of data entry/lay out on it? Wouldn't have to be anything super flash - just lots of text, formatting, links and the usual garb

[Icewalker]

Actually, this is something I'm interested in as well, to help out a friend of mine. What does it take, and where can I learn to, create a Wiki.

Also, I'd like to add a question: is it possible to have a wiki in an offline database, so it is kept as a file instead of hosted online, what with it costing money to keep a website running?

[valadil]

The most common wiki is mediawiki. It's pretty simple to edit. One of it's goals was to be editable by people who weren't programmers. It's the only wiki I have experience with.

Mediawiki does include a word processor style editor. Bold, italics, links, etc can be applied to text by clicking a button.

Text editing by hand is easy too. Generally you'll wrap text with a special character. For example, apostrophes are used for emphasis. '' before and after text will make it italic. ''' before and after make it bold. Some text is prepended with a special character instead of wrapped. Putting a * before text gives it a bullet point and several lines of those make a list. ** indents the list. Etc. Oh and I should point out that all these codes are well documented: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_edit

Icewalker:

There are several desktop wikis available. I've tried zim and it seems decent, but I don't know if it's available for windows. Because I'm familiar with mediawiki, I usually just install that one my desktop. It's overly complicated (you need to install apache, mysql (or another db), and php) if you aren't already familiar with web administration. But it is doable and there may even be guides for how to do it easily.

[Jimorian]

One I've used is TiddlyWiki. It's a single file wiki container that can be used online or offline just using a browser to point at the file. They offer free hosting of files or you can host it yourself, or just keep it on the HD. If you have it onlne, you can keep it private, or share but keep control of editing, or allow just those with a password to edit.

http://www.tiddlywiki.com/

I've only used it to keep track of personal projects (great for novels, frex), but it looks like there's a lot of potential with it, and the learning curve isn't too steep.