elecplus wrote: Please … point us to a tutorial on how to create, add to, and edit pages? … There are many of us willing to try, and our results will not be as professional as Beardsmore, but at least we are willing.
I wonder if I am the only person who ever taught himself/herself HTML by playing with it? I simply took a copy of a lecturer's site and dumped it into my own account (so now my Web space showed a copy of his site) and then looked for parts of the page that stood out (e.g. headings) and then looked through the HTML for that same text, to see what code was responsible for it.
Consistency is important in presentation, and you can achieve consistency by copying/pasting existing pages and adapting them to look like what you want them to. The only awkward parts are images (no preview for the description at all during upload) and categories (the Preview button previews the categorisation, but the Preview tab does not, and the Preview button is awful).
Over time, you may start remembering the syntax, but with the infoboxes it's still easier to copy/paste rather than try to remember all the field names! Unlike making a new website where you have to understand the code, with the wiki you only need to copy/paste/adapt existing pages.
Also, I would suggest enabling the spelling checker in your browser, so that mistakes are caught early.
XMIT wrote: I have a personal hatred of the MediaWiki markup language.
You need to learn to stop hating it. It's really not a complicated language for most part. You're an intelligent man and you shouldn't struggle picking up a simple few codes. Most of it can go onto a small crib sheet if it's really that hard to remember, but there's also an editor toolbar to help out with things (that I never even remember is there as I just learnt all the basics and type it straight in).
Having thus far used—to some extent or another—BASIC (BBC BASIC, QBasic, VBScript, REALbasic, OPL, MacASP …), C, C++, Common LISP, Prolog, PHP, Perl, Java, JavaScript, DOS batch script, UNIX shell script (Bash I guess, I don't know the intricacies of what Bash added/changed), AppleScript, PowerShell as well as BBCode (UBB, phpBB, …) HTML, XML, CSS and wiki code (PmWiki, TWiki and MediaWiki) it's not impossible to learn and remember programming and markup languages. LISP is still evil, of course.
(I've configured my text editor to flag up in red when I use Perlisms in JavaScript, such as "unless" or "undef", as it's hard keeping those two straight in my head, as I use both of them all the time.)
MediaWiki has some horrible ideas (the template system is nearly impossible to use for anything clever) but the basics are really not that hard. The only really silly issue that I do hate is the appalling way that they overloaded [[…]] to link, inline and categorise depending on the presence or absence of a leading colon.
However, you just get used to it. People believe that you can solve all the woes in an language by creating a new language. Now you have two defective languages. I don't care for Python's idea on indenting (since I use indentation creatively for multi-line statements) but I've trawled through so much incorrectly-indented code to realise why that idea came about and when reading code I think I'd find it immensely helpful!
Because then editors would need to learn two markup languages.
I thought I was missing something...