What is a Wiki?

Wiki Formatting

While HTML likes to scrunch your words together no matter how the lines are broken up, lines are more important in wiki formatting. To create a new paragraph, just put a blank line between your paragraphs. For example, if you type the following text into the edit window...

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once    
considering how in the world she was to get out again.  
 
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way,  
and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a  
moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself  
falling down a very deep well.

...this shows up in the wiki as:

"In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well."

As you can see, blank spaces are important to the flow of a paragraph, but where you end your lines doesn't matter to Notebook. Wiki formatting simplicity also carries over to the creation of bulleted lists.

Creating Links and Pages in Wiki

When creating links and pages, Notebook works just like a wiki, except it works offline. To link to the page, just put the page title in brackets. This keeps wiki markup very readable:

The [rabbit-hole] went straight on like a [tunnel] for some way,  
and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that [Alice] had not a  
moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself  
falling down a very deep [well].

In the previous example, the word "rabbit-hole" would link to a page entitled "rabbit-hole," the word "tunnel" would link to a page entitled "tunnel," etc. Many online wikis, such as Wikipedia, also support an extended version of the link format. The extended version ([[pagename text]]) allows the editor to specify the link text. Here's an example:

The [[rabbit-hole]] went straight on like a [[rabbit-hole tunnel]] for some way,
and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that [[characterlist Alice]] had not a
moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself
falling down a very deep [[rabbit-hole well]].

In this case, the words "rabbit-hole", "tunnel", and "well" all point to the "rabbit hole" page, and rightly so. They all refer to the rabbit hole. The word "Alice" now links to a central list of characters. The extended markup, which isn't supported by Notebook, comes in handy on other wikis.

The original wiki uses a different method to link pages, called JoinCapitalizedWords or CamelCase, and is still used in many Wikis. This eliminates the need for brackets, but reading a PageWithMany JoinCapitalizedWords can be tiring.

If you create a link and the page does not yet exist, clicking on the link will automatically create the page and bring up an edit window for the new page. Here's what happens in notebook when you click a link to a nonexistent page:

Create a new page in Notebook by clicking a link to a nonexistent page

As it's an offline application, Notebook also sports many advanced features that aren't found in ordinary Wikis, such as embeddable TCL code, which can collect information from other pages, perform statistical analyses, or autogenerate information. These "magic" features allow users to create handy plugins as well.

Unfortunately, Notebook cannot yet publish to an online wiki. If you want that feature, you may want to try WiKit, the Tcl'ers Wiki. It sports interfaces for both the Web and an os-independent client application similar to Notebook. Although the client application for the Tcl'ers Wiki isn't as nice as Notebook, it can publish to the online wiki, which makes it a very useful wiki interface application.

Notebook is a great application for keeping track of notes, thoughts, and other bits of information. My father, who is not particularly geeky, uses it to record his notes for grad school. But Wikis are most powerful when you put them on the Web.