Help:Wiki Organization
From Clinicaltools.com
One of the challenges in working with wikis is organization. Since they're designed for fast, simple, and decentralized content creation, the onus is on users to "self-organize" organically. Fortunately, the MediaWiki software provides functionality to aid in that effort.
Categories
Many folks are probably aware of the "Special:Allpages" page, on which the software automatically catalogs every entry within the entire wiki. While helpful at some level (especially if you like to use Ctrl-F), it is not a particularly good long-term solution. However, we also can catalog entries into different categories. For example, if you look at the entry for Clinical Tools Usability Guidelines, you'll notice at the bottom that it's cataloged under the Usability and Web Design categories. How did I do that? I simply clicked on the edit tab and inserted the following at the bottom of the edit field:
[[Category:Usability]] [[Category:Web Design]]
This markup signals to MediaWiki that you want to catalog the entry under a new or existing category. In addition, MediaWiki automatically updates its Special:Categories list whenever someone makes a change (as you can see, that list is a lot more user-friendly than "All Pages"). If possible, whenever you insert a new entry on the wiki, please include one more categories at the bottom of the edit field.
Note that if you insert a new Category, then the link shows up in red, which signifies that it points to a page (in this case, a Category page) that hasn't been created yet. If you click on the red link, you'll be directed to a page with an edit field, where you can establish your new Category by inserting and saving some text. For example, in the case of the Pain/Addiction Curriculum Category, I just inserted "This category contains pages related to our Pain and Addiction curriculum."
Redirecting
When changing titles of wiki pages to make them clearer, one doesn't get rid of the old title per se; rather, one sets up a redirect so that users who go to the original title get transferred automatically to the new title. For example, I changed the title of the SBIR Grant and Contract Interim Reports entry to SBIR Grant and Contract Reports. The original link still exists, but it now automatically takes one to the new title (though, oddly enough, the old URL remains in the navigation toolbar). Whenever this happens, MediaWiki posts the following note at the top of the entry: (Redirected from ORIGINAL TITLE). Please note that only administrators can redirect pages.
