EditingHintsForThisWiki

Full schema as HTML

Full schema as XSD

New to Wiki technology? Read ThreeEasySteps before reading this.

Dealing with wiki links

There is always a tension in Wiki between the use of WikiWords and use of standard words that might be easier for the readership to follow. A WikiWord must have at least two "ordinary" words as part of it. If we bowed to the technology instead of the readers, we might write PathwayElement instead of Pathway to permit a discussion of an invasion Pathway. Instead, we use the reader-friendly terminology and stick to natural words as much as possible, with some cost to those who are commenting upon or editing discussion topics.

Favoring readers over commentators and editors brings a cost that still leaves us bound to wiki technology for most effective use of wiki. Namely, a WikiWord automatically creates a hypertext link to its definition (if there is one) and this makes wiki extremely powerful. (NOTE: if you see a '?' on a link that means nobody has started that topic yet! If you click on it, you will be the one that starts it! For words that correspond to IASPS elements this is best left to the IASPS wiki maintainers.). The cost of this is that if you do want a link on an ordinary word--which you normally would for words that are part of the schema--you have to surround the word with double square brackets: [[Facts]]

A second common issue of linking arises when writing schema paths like Facts/LocationSpecificFacts. Because the LocationSpecificFacts term is not preceded by a space, wiki does not recognize it as a WikiWord. Therefore, if you wish a fully linked version of this as displayed in the preceding sentence, you need to write [[Facts]]/[[LocationSpecificFacts]] in any edit session containing such an expression.

The main cost of ignoring all this is that some convenient links will be missing. Nothing else serious will happen, and this can always be remedied by a subsequent edit.

-- BobMorris - 19 Nov 2005