This is the first in a short series of occasional posts on how to get yourself up to speed in the use of wikis. No time like the present, no subject as elemental as a “WikiLink” or “WikiWord.” Mark has this to say about the relationship between WikiWords and domain names.

The importance of WikiWords in the wiki is paramount. They let you easily link up ideas and information that relate to each other. The fact that we can do this easily in a wiki is one of the best things about it. Here, in this wiki, I can WikiLink any domain and build a relationship. Be it Google.com or GoogleMaps.com - really any domain now becomes a conversation destination, a place for conversation or thought to travel to.

And here’s an outline of the nature and use of links in AboutUs.

A WikiLink is a clickable hyper-link from one page on a wiki website to another page.

To link pages here at AboutUs, place the title of the page you want to link to in double brackets and save your edit.

For example:

• [[AboutUs.org]] will give you AboutUs.org upon save. (Note: To work properly, link just the domain, “www” or “http” aren’t needed here.)
• [[InterestingHappenings]] produces InterestingHappenings.
• [[Special:Recentchanges|Recent Changes]] shows up as Recent Changes.

To begin [[WikiLinking]] navigate to a page you would like to place a link on (e.g. hit your “back” button or search for a page and hit “Find!”, etc.) and hit the green edit link.

For more details see our instructions or print a cheat sheet of how to make things look better here and polices on what we think is fair link building here. Feel free to contact us with any questions.

So, if you haven’t used this linking function so far on AboutUs, go for it. Experiment with it. One of the things that gives AboutUs, and any wiki, extra value, is the creation of relationships between ideas and pages. Those relationships are established almost solely as the result of your judgment.

The next issue we’ll cover in this series is what is known in wikispeak as a CamelCase word, using something you may be familiar with: Movie Websites. (This is what is known as a FutureLink, so nothing is there, yet.)