.. _About Course Wiki:

About the Course Wiki
######################

.. tags:: educator, concept

Courses can optionally configure a wiki application and set it up for appropriate use in your course.
If you have specific expectations for how the wiki should be
used, communicate these expectations to your learners and staff. You can
:ref:`seed the wiki<Seeding the Wiki>` with specific content and provide a
skeleton structure and some exemplars. At the beginning of the course, explain
how you want the course wiki to be used, and provide clear instructions and
guidelines for its use.

Common uses for the course wiki might include the following activities.

* Sharing answers to course FAQs and collecting new FAQs.
* Sharing editable course information, such as download and installation
  instructions for software required for the course
* Providing shared access to learner-created resources, perhaps as part of a
  collaborative exercise.
* Sharing errata for the course.
* Collecting suggestions for future runs of the course.

As learners and course team members create and edit wiki articles, they
contribute to a repository of information about your course that can be
immediately useful to other learners or useful for you and your course team as
you develop other courses or future runs of the same course.

.. Some courses have linked wikis, which can be useful for course re-runs or for course series. You link a wiki with another course's wiki by...?

The wiki for each course is a "child" wiki of the single wiki that exists for your
whole instance. From within any course wiki, select the top-level **Wiki** link
in the breadcrumb trail at the top of the page to visit the instance-wide wiki.

.. _Wikis Overview:

********************************
Managing the Course Wiki
********************************

Keep these points in mind as you design the wiki for your course.

* Be clear about the wiki's purpose or for different parts of the wiki.
  For example, are some parts of the wiki only for disseminating information?
  If so, ensure that only your course team has written
  access to those articles.

* Decide whether some parts of the wiki are intended for learner collaboration
  or learner input. Make sure that learners are able to create and edit wiki
  articles in those sections, and use text to clearly indicate to learners that
  these pages can be edited.

* Think about the different tasks that will be performed by people in different
  roles. Typically, you want your course team to have some privileges that
  learners do not have. For example, course team members can delete wiki
  articles, but learners cannot.

Members of the course team can perform these tasks to manage the wiki.

* :ref:`Show or Hide the Wiki<Showing or Hiding the Wiki>`
* :ref:`Control Wiki Access<Controlling Wiki Access>`
* :ref:`Seed the Wiki<Seeding the Wiki>`
* :ref:`Lock a Wiki Article<Locking a Wiki Article>`
* :ref:`Delete a Wiki Article<Deleting a Wiki Article>`
* :ref:`Purge a Wiki Article<Purging a Wiki Article>`
* :ref:`Restore a Deleted Wiki Article<Restoring a Deleted Wiki Article>`

All users, including learners, can perform the following tasks, depending on
the permissions that you set for an article.

* Add a Wiki Article
* Edit a Wiki Article
* Manage Versions of a Wiki Article
* Search for Wiki Articles

.. seealso::
 

 :ref:`Manage the Course Wiki` (how to)

 :ref:`Contribute to the Course Wiki` (how to)


**Maintenance chart**

+--------------+-------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------------+
| Review Date  | Working Group Reviewer        |   Release      |Test situation                  |
+--------------+-------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------------+
| 2025-03-20   | Documentation WG              | Sumac          | Pass                           |
+--------------+-------------------------------+----------------+--------------------------------+
