Welcome to the ArchLUGKwiki

Is this the right page for you?

If you know what a "wiki" is and want to know how this one works, see KwikiHelpIndex.

If you have no idea what this is, or how to use it, read on!

What this is:

This is a "wiki" which ArchLUG is using to provide an online collaboration tool for our members and the greater St. Louis region Linux community that we serve. Technically, it's a "kwiki", but that's just the name of the software that runs the wiki. Just like "Linux" is the name of an "operating system" that we hope is why you're visiting us. From here on out, we'll use the terms "wiki" and "kwiki" interchangeably, but if we do say "kwiki", we usually mean something that's specific to our site.

What's a "wiki"?

A "wiki" is a system of collaborative hypertext. Hypertext is just a big word for web pages, basically. The collaboration is what throws most people for a loop: anyone at all can make any changes they like to these pages without any authorization or approval from other people. Think of every page and every word in the wiki as being "community-owned".

This tends to be a bit upsetting, at first -- what if someone comes along and just deletes everything? After all, the Internet is full of those 3vil-h4x0rs, right?

Well, it turns out that most people don't do that sort of thing, and the wiki isn't without its safeguards; at least in theory we'd be able to recreate the whole thing in an hour of work or so.

Why does this exist?

The purpose of any Wiki (we use a specific kind of Wiki, called a KwikiWiki) is to provide an easy medium to share information with anyone who wishes to learn. The Wiki mechanism also allows one to make changes to the information if it is inaccurate, out of date, or just presented in a confusing way. :)

Hopefully, many eyes will glance at each page and many changes will be made to each of them to hammer them down into something concise and useful.

How do I use it?

If you are new to Wiki, you might want to visit the HelpPage, set your Preferences, and then play around on the SandBox.

After that, dive in! There are many links off the front page, which you can access from any other page by clicking the ArchLUG logo.

You can also enter a word into the Search box and get a list of all pages in the Wiki that contain that word.

Following the link that is the title of every page performs a search for that WikiWord, so you can quickly see any related topics within the Wiki.

The ADMIN button is for WikiMasters to edit this page, but any WikiUser can edit any page with an EDIT button. Hopefully, you will tell us who you are by setting your Preferences.

How do I contribute?

Just click the EDIT button at the top and bottom of almost every page. Follow the KwikiFormattingRules to be able to do special stuff, but it's possible to ignore all that and just write text with blank lines between paragraphs and everything will look fine.

There are more complex things you can do, like setting up your username so you can sign entries and even have a page about yourself; to do this, head on over to Preferences and add yourself. You could also edit any page and write something that would refer to that page -- an easy way to do this is to sign an entry, like this:

--ImaTuxhead

Then press SAVE, and follow the link that creates: you'll see a page for editing, to which you should add some comments about yourself before pressing SAVE.

Then you can click the Preferences link at the top of the page and add your name, just as you signed it. If everything goes well, your computer will then remember what your name is on this wiki and the RecentChanges page will list your name next to changes you make.

Your comments needed!

This is arguably the most important page; if you don't understand anything about the above, or the instructions are vague or inaccurate, We'd really like to know. Either add your question to this page, or send us email at webmaster@archlug.org