The purpose of this learn-by-doing challenge is to:

1. Use your personal sandbox page for practising wiki edits.
2. Learn basic wiki skills for formatting text including links and images which you will need for collaborative authoring of OER learning resources in the wiki.
3. Familiarise yourself with the operations of the VisualEditor but also build a basic understanding of wikitext markup.
4. Demonstrate your skills by publishing a personal user page incorporating the text formatting features, links and image(s).

Introduction

A wiki page has two modes:

1. The published mode – the view which a visitor to the wiki site will see; and
2. The editing mode – which you will use when editing text on the wiki.

To activate the edit mode, you will need to log in to the wiki and click on the Edit link that appears near the top of the page. There are two ways you can edit a wiki page:

1. Using the VisualEditor – accessed via the “Edit” link near the top of the page (on the right). Editing a page using the VisualEditor is easy and intuitive, but you will not be able to take full advantage of all the features of the Mediawiki software.
2. Using wikitext – accessed via the “Edit source” link (next to the “Edit” link). We recommend that you familiarise yourself with what wikitext looks like and how it works, but you don’t need to learn all the markup now. However, for uploading images on WikiEducator which are not available on the Wikimedia Commons, you will need to use wikitext.

VisualEditor resources

• Wikipedia’s VisualEditor user guide (WikiEducator uses the Mediawiki wiki platform – the same software which hosts Wikipedia.)

Wikitext resources

• Explaining wikitext
• Wikipedia’s Cheat sheet (also available as a PDF for printing)
• Basic wikitext for uploading an image
• using wiki text Tutorials for using wikitext