Wikis in Moodle

Wikis are a very useful tool in educational terms. They are one of the main tools in social constructivist views of knowledge creation. As a group or class activity, one person, perhaps the teacher, provides some introductory information about a topic and other people contribute to it. And they link key concepts in their entries to other entries.

Contributors can enter their informative text by clicking any of the wiki linked key words. These are created in edit mode by putting the word or phrase between [square brackets]. At the start of a wiki project, these links appear as question marks - wiki's way of saying "create a page of this name, please."

Once you have created a page, the question mark disappears and the word or phrase becomes a link to your page.

When you click on a question mark, a new page is created. You are in edit mode. You can copy or type text there. DO NOT COPY FROM MS WORD OR ANYTHING THAT HAS ITS OWN FORMATTING AS THAT WILL probably be incompatible with wiki's formatting. Paste your text from Notepad for example, or you can resave your Word document, if that's what you have created your texts in, in text only format.

Then Save the wiki page. You will see your text and the items you put in square brackets will have the ? beside them for the next person to create a page from. This is the organic nature of the beast.

Note that wikis cannot have more than one page with the same name. If you attempt to create a page that has already been created, it will take you to the page that has that name.

Short link to this page:

http://bit.ly/maelt_wiki4students