Create and Edit a Wiki in SharePoint Foundation

First start with the Home page of the wiki, or any page in the Wiki where you hope to create a new page. Click the Page tab on the top right hand side of the page.  If you don't have a Page tab you don't have rights to edit the page.

Clicking page brings up SharePoint's Ribbon.  Click View All Pages in the Ribbon to see a List of All Pages in the Wiki

This brings up a list of all the Wiki Pages

To Add a new wiki page click the Add New Page link at the bottom of the list.  Provide a title for the Wiki page.  Be careful to not make any typos in the title, as it is will be used as the Wiki page name even if you change the title in the future. Click create.

This creates a new blank wiki page.  It is critical that if you are going to paste text in to the page you use the Paste, Pates plaintext link in the Ribbon.  If you just use Ctrl -V to paste text you will carry over formatting from the original document, that can make you page look inconsistent, be hard to manage, and maybe not even show up properly on some machines.

SharePoint Foundation provides the Ribbon to Edit Text.  To save changes to the new Wiki click Save & Close.  To edit a Wiki Page click the Page Tab and first Check Out (to Check Out the Document) and Edit.  Both Check Out and Edit are in the right hand of the Ribbon.  Once you are dune editing a page click Check In on the top Ribbon.  Checking in will ask you to provide a comment for the version, and to fill out all necessary Metatadata
 

To add a href link to any web page on the Internet or intranet, you click Insert, highlight the text and click Link.

With version control turned on for Wikis each check-in creates a new version.  You can view version history by going to the Wiki Library, mousing over a item and right mousing clicking.  From the menu that shows up select Version history.

Enterprise Wiki Layouts in SharePoint 2010

Additionally there’s a new Site Collection feature called “Enterprise Wiki Layouts” for creating a large-scale wiki with categories and page layouts.

iLove SharePoint: Preview - Wikis in SharePoint 2010

I think there can only be three views on Wikis in SharePoint 2007. People either hate all wikis, they don't hate wikis but they hate SharePoint 2007wikis, or they have never used SharePoint wikis in 2007.

I think SharePoint 2007 is essentially an alternative to Wiki Media, and it has all the problems of Wiki Media. Its very hard to use correctly, you need to have programming skills to format things, and you need to know what you are linking to before hand, which limits its "organic growth issues."

Beyond that you have a terrible "copy and paste" problem. Allowing you to copy and paste in word documents I guess is suppose to make SharePoint 2007 wikis easier to use, but I have found that it causes more trouble than it is worth. I have seen that most wikis that are not centrally controlled and extensively planned out inevitably become mess or formats and layouts that have been pasted in to the document and now are embedded HTML. Fixing a wiki of this kind can be a real nasty problem.

Personally I wanted to see SharePoint 2010 wikis more like the wikispace.com tool.

Wikispaces I have found is much easier to grow organically because pasting works better and editing is cleaner and has a better UI. Linking provides a button and a tool and I could work for hours without really "breaking" the wiki. SharePoint 2007 wikis could be broken. Formatting got to be a mess and links were hard to find. I kept finding I would make a link and SharePoint would create a new wiki page. All the time I would forget there was one page for the singular and one page for the plural. I could create a rule that definitions should be in the singular but this felt unnatural and I found myself lapsing. In the end I gave up on SharePoint wiki at home and moved all the wiki work I had done on SharePoint to my wikispaces page in the Cloud and have never looked back.

So SharePoint 2010 had a lot of nuts and bolts issues to resolve which so far it has not. There is still not a easy to use button to link a wiki and though their is a keyboard shortcut to help wiki linking its nothing like the Wikispaces tool.

Rather than repair the core WIkip Microsoft has seemed to have just created an Enterprise Wiki that uses SharePoint's Web Content Management Publishing to control the look and publishing of a wiki. Permission to speak freely on this one. It seems that Microsoft has taken the two of the worst functions and made one new function out of it. SharePoint has also allowed used to ad web parts to a body of a Wiki but again this seems to be combining two bad things to create an even more evil new thing.

Okay I have not had a chance yet to work on a SharePoint 2010 Wiki like I have worked on SharePoint 2007 wikis, but so far I have not seen my wish list satisfied. I realy didn't want to make a publishing wiki because frankly the publishing feature in SharePoint is kind of weak and not really what people like about the tool. SharePoint is about light weight easy collaboration, and the wiki has been a very weak part of it.

Socioology of SharePoint 101: Wiki, the Bad News

Google Image Result for http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/jackiebo/WindowsLiveWriter/SuperchargeyourSharePointWikiAddingColum_D78C/image%5B30%5D.png

I guess the first first rule about first rules is never to have a first rule.

Which actually means sometimes its probably okay to have a first rule.

As for SharePoint there are a number of techie first rules from not to use virtual hardware for databases in live to always run application pools on unique AD identities.

But as for once SharePoint goes wild, what rules are there?

Companies will spend vast amounts of time and effort to lay the technical groundwork (generally being taken to the cleaners by contractors making it all seem much harder than it is) and rush SharePoint to the users without much thinking about what does or does not work. IT will find itself being hit by requests for things like Blogs and Wikis without any criteria for selection.

Well let me make one rule I think is pretty hard and fast: don't use Wikis.

This is for a number of reasons:

1. SharePoints Wiki is not very good
2. Wikis are not very good
3. Users find wikis impossible to use
4. Wikis can never be finished (you can prove this actually and its a real flaw)
   

But I would like to concentrate on the social reasons Wikis make for bad collaboration.



Wikis have the following key problems:

1. Because Wikis an unstructured media it is unclear how to use them. This means different users will go about them in various different ways. But because most wikis deploy open contribution models (there is just too much work for 1 person) this leads to endless debates on how the Wiki will be used. Look at wikipedia, which gets more press over its debates on how to govern than its freedom of expression.
   
2. Because wikis provide for a massive network connecting all nodes, the number of missing links grows exponentially with the number of nodes added. That means for every piece of new information added to the site the amount of linking grows in relationship to the existing sites. To but it not too nicely the more you work on a wiki the more undone it becomes.
3. Wikis push consolidation and power of political process on the web. There are millions of blogs out there, and only one Wikipedia. Wikis demand so much effort, and require so much time be spent on their government that they consolidate effort and thus control in a few hands, thus ruining the entire collaboration benefit of the web.
4. Wikis produce unstructured code that is hard to machine read, hard to mash up, and ugly.
5. Collaboration on the text, rather than follow up comments as in blogs, makes for long poorly written post that make less sense in time.

The key problem with wikis I would sum up is that they are hard to start, require lots of work and lots of management, and the more you work on them the less they get done.