The Labdoo platform allows users to create their own wiki pages. To do so, your user will need to have the role of "book writer". If you don't have this role assigned and would like to write wiki pages, please email contact@labdoo.org. (You can check the current roles assigned to your user by going to 'My account' and then clicking the tab 'My roles'.)
The Labdoo platform relies on the concept of wiki pages to allow users share knowledge and best practices. Here are some of the most common situations in which you will want to create a wiki page:
To create a wiki page, follow the next steps:
The body section of a wiki page allows writers to use a simplified form of HTML tags to help them format their content. While the page 'Compose tips' (a link to this page is provided at the bottom of the "body" field in each wiki form) provides a detail description of each of the HTML tags supported by the Labdoo wiki system, in this section we provide additional information for some of the tags that are a bit more advanced.
Inserting images
As explained in the 'Compose tips', you can insert an image using the <img> tag. For instance, the following tag:
<img src="/profiles/labdoo/files/pictures/laptop.png" width="50"/>
generates this image:
To upload the actual image, follow the next steps:
Figure. Through the file management interface, you can upload images and files. If you are adding images for the wiki, please make sure to upload your content inside the folder 'content'. Inside the folder 'content', it is also recommended that you create more folders to help you organize further your images and files, while reusing existing folders if the content belongs to the same category. |
Formatting figures in your wiki page
If you want to insert an image into your text, please follow the following format:
Here is an example:
<hr/>
<table align="center">
<tr><td>
<em> Figure. This is the Labdoo logo.</em>
</td></tr>
<tr><td>
<img src="/profiles/labdoo/files/pictures/laptop.png" width="50"/>
</td></tr>
</table>
<hr/>
Which is displayed as follows:
Figure. This is the Labdoo logo. |
Inserting videos
You may insert videos using the following simple tag:
For example:
[video:https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/watch?v=Gpo-7GjFydw]
For a good description on how to insert videos please directly refer to the 'Compose tips' page under the 'Video Filter' section.
If you need to create a link to a page that lives inside www.labdoo.org (for instance, a link to another wiki page), it's important to use relative paths starting with the string ../
. For instance, if you want to create a link to this wiki page, follow this example:
<a href="../content/creating-internal-links">An example link to this wiki page</a>
Which generates this link:
An example link to this wiki page
Using the string ../
in front of your internal links serves two goals:
The goal of Labdoo is to break barriers so that education can reach out to all the regions of the world. A key to overcoming these barriers is the capability to write documents not just in one language but in as many as possible. To that end, the Labdoo wiki system provides a few simple functions facilitating the translation of any wiki doc into any other language. If you find a relevant wiki page or book that is not available in your language, we encourage you to take action and start a translation on your own.
Here are the steps to translate a wiki page or book:
It is important to not make a wiki page publicly available until its text has been carefully proofread and corrected from any typos and grammatical mistakes. This is to ensure that all content abides to a minimum standard of quality.
To accomplish this, each wiki page has a tag on its top called 'Publish/Unpublish' (this feature is only available to users who have the 'book writer' role enabled) that the wiki writer can use to control whether that page is publicly visible or not. Please use this feature to control when your page should be published. Notice also that only users with the 'book writer' role will be able to see unpublished pages, to all other users such pages are not visible nor searchable.
Because the wiki is designed to be a collaborative tool, often we need to allow other users access to edit wiki pages. There are two methods to allow other users to edit wiki pages:
Figure. To grant a user the right to edit a specific wiki page, click on the 'Edit' tab of that wiki page and add the user to the field 'Grant edit rights'. Doing this will allow the user to edit this wiki page as well as all of its children wiki pages. |
The Labdoo wiki system provides revision control on each of the wiki pages. Every time a user modifies a wiki page, the changes are tracked. This allows for instance to roll back changes that were introduced by mistake or to see when certain changes were introduced.
To use this feature, click on the 'Revisions' tab that you will find on the top of each wiki page. (This feature is only available to users who have the 'book writer' role enabled.)
Every wiki page has at its bottom a link labeled 'Printer-friendly version' which viewers can use to generate a printer friendly version of that page. (To test it, click on the same link you will find at the bottom of this page.) To print the complete book instead of a single page, go to the first page of the book and click on its 'Printer-friendly version' link, it will take you to a page containing the whole book.
This feature can also be used to export the book into a PDF file. For that, when printing the book using your browser printing option, select the option to save it as a PDF. (This option will depend on the browser you are using.)
To download a wiki so that it can be accessed offline, you can use openly available tools that allow you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory. One tool that people have successfully used to download the Labdoo Wiki is called HTTrack, which is available for free (under GPL, libre/free software license) from http://www.httrack.com/.
This type of tools come very handy for instance when you want to include a certain wiki book into a laptop that you are going to bring to a school that may have limited Internet access. If you have any questions on how to use these tools, you can ask around in the Quality Assurance team wall.
HTTrack documentation (overview) https://www.httrack.com/html/index.html
HTTrack how to use https://www.httrack.com/html/shelldoc.html (beginners)
HTTrack Manual https://www.httrack.com/html/fcguide.html (experts)
The Labdoo Team has collected and prepared for you these useful offline wikis:
https://www.labdoo.org/wiki-index
https://wiki.lxde.org/en/Main_Page
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/
https://help.ubuntu.com/
These wikis will be updated and can be downloaded from our FTP server http://ftp.labdoo.org/download/Public/.
While there is quite a bit of flexibility when writing your own wiki books, it is important to follow certain best practice rules to ensure that the content provided within the Labdoo platform is of good quality. As a wiki writer, please follow the next recommendations:
<em>text here</em>
. If your tag does not include any object inside (such as the new line tag <br>
or the horizontal line tag <hr>
), then you have two options: you can use either <br></br>
(without any object between the clauses) or the more compact version <br/>
. This first best practice is specially important because the Labdoo system provides automatic back ups of all the wiki content which needs to parse all the wiki pages, and if the tags are not correctly set up, the parsing process can break.
The general structure of the Labdoo wiki system is similar to other standard wiki systems (such as the Wikipedia) and hence it is fairly free style. That means that there is no need to have a lot of synchronization on what types of documents are created. If you believe that a certain article or document belongs to the Labdoo wiki system, then in general you can go ahead and create it. The wiki is an open system and your work will be subject to peer reviewing by other Labdooers so that if the new document is inappropriate to the subjects of interest in the Labdoo platform, then you will be given instructions on how to edit the content. As in any open wiki system, inappropriate content can be unpublished at any time, to ensure the wiki abides to certain standards of quality and relevancy.
Besides the above general 'free style' principle, the wiki does have a few categories of documents that are considered core to the Labdoo platform and standard for all available languages. When writing a new document, one needs to first consider if the new page belongs to any of these categories and structure the document accordingly, ensuring that there is no overlapping and that the new text follows a smooth reading experience with respect to the core documents. Here is the list of core documents/categories:
The general principle to add content to the wiki system is as follows: if the subject of the new wiki page belongs to any of the above core categories, then consider adding the new page as part of the above documents; otherwise, you can create a new wiki book.
Wiki books have multiple wiki pages, each page being a section inside the book. When you create or manage a wiki book, you will most likely need to rearrange the order in which each of these sections is presented. For instance, if you have a book consisting of three wiki pages called "Introduction", "Initial Steps", "Advanced Steps", it is logical that you would like to order these sections in the book by presenting first the section "Introduction", then the section "Initial Steps" and lastly the section "Advanced Steps".
To rearrange the order of pages in a wiki book, do the following:
Figure. On the reordering page of a book, click on the small icons with a cross located at the left of each element and drag that element up or down to position it in the right location. You can also use the numerical weights to reorder the content. |
The Labdoo Wiki engine has a module to detect broken links. This module runs in the background automatically from time to time, scanning Labdoo wiki pages and checking for broken links, so you don't have to manually do that by yourself. This means that using this feature is very simple, as described next.
In order to see the list of broken links that are found in wiki pages that you have written, go to "My account" on the upper right corner of any Labdoo page and select the option 'My broken links'. (Please notice that you will only see this option if you are logged into your account and if your account has 'wiki writer' rights.) This will take you to a page under your account with all the broken links that have been detected in wiki pages that you have written. For each broken link that you see in this list, click where it says 'Edit node $NUMBER'. This will take you to that node (in edit mode) where you can directly correct the broken link. If you are a wiki writer, from time to time please do make sure to go to this page and ensure that you have no broken links.
There is also a way to see all the broken links (not just those located in wiki pages that you write, but all the broken links from all the wiki pages) in a centralized list. To see this list, go to the 'Wiki' menu on the top of any Labdoo page and select the option 'All broken links'. (Again, only if you have 'wiki writer' rights you will see this option.) By clicking on this option, you will be taken to a page which gathers the complete list of broken links from all the wiki pages.
A note on broken links error codes. Each broken link comes with its own error code (see figure below for some examples). The most important broken links are those marked with error code 404, which means that the link does not exist ('Page not found'). Please fix all the broken links with error code 404. Other error codes may not need to be fixed. For instance, error code 301 means 'page permanently moved to a new URL', but the link itself is correct, so you don't need to correct any links with error 301.
A note on how pages are scanned. Broken links are found by scanning pages. This happens in two different ways: (1) when a page is saved, the link checker will provide a warning if any of the links are broken, so you can immediately fix it; (2) every hour (at the top of the hour), there is a background process that also checks for broken links. Notice also that when you fix a link, its entry will be immediately removed from the list of broken links.
Figure. Click on 'My broken links' to access the list of broken links found in wiki pages. |