PrattWiki:Introduction
This page represents an introduction to the Pratt Wiki project.
Purpose
The primary purpose of this site is to serve as an easily-edited, intelligently cross-linked source of information on topics of special interest to the students, staff, and faculty of the Pratt School of Engineering.
Use
There are several different ways to use this resource. It is likely that the most common will be as a searchable source of information about items of interest to Pratt - for example, how to start MATLAB or how to get a document double-spaced in LaTeX. Hopefully, the more people interact with this site, however, the more each person will be compelled to add to it, whether it is answering questions collected in Category:Questions or taking part in conversations in the Community Portal or just editing typographical errors that crop up from time to time.
The first use - Pratt Wiki as resource - is very simple. On the left side of the window there is a search block and two buttons - Go and Search. The difference between these is as follows - Go will look for a page with a title that matches the text in the box while Search will look for pages that have text that matches. That is to say, if you want to find a page about MATLAB, you should put MATLAB in the box and click Go - if you want to see all pages that have the word MATLAB in them, slick Search. Note that the Search option will also list pages whose title contains a particular phrase.
Once you have gotten to a particular page, hopefully the information you need will be there. You can pan through the page in exactly the same way as other web pages. There may also be hyperlinks, however, that lead to other pages on this wiki, pages on other wikia, or pages not on wikia. For the former, the link will be indicated in blue - for example, the Pratt Wiki page on \(\LaTeX\) can be found at LaTeX. For pages on other wikia that are a part of the Wikimedia family, the link may look the same - a link to Wikipedia's entry on \(\LaTeX\) could be: wikipedia:LaTeX. For links to other web pages, a graphic after the link indicates that you will be leaving the wikiverse - for example, if you wanted to go to the LaTeX Project. Note the blue box with the arrow coming out of it telling you that you will leave the wikiverse if you click that link.
Aside from searching for and reading particular pages, you may want to see what is going on with the wiki itself. There are several useful links for accomplishing this. First, there is a Recent changes link in the box at the left of the screen that will give you a list, in reverse chronological order, of all the edits that have been made to the wiki as well as who made them, when they were made, and a summary provided by the editor. There is also an option to go to a Random page which does...pretty much exactly what you would expect. Finally, there is also a link to Special pages - this will bring up a list of the special pages that the wiki can generate, including a list of All pages, a compilation of all the Categories being used, and a list of Wanted pages that shows pages that have been linked to but for which there is no content. The special pages can help both navigate and understand the site better and also point out areas that need the most work.
