Help:Finding Information

Finding Information

How to help people find their way around the site.

Browsing by category
Pages in a wiki are not restrained to a hierarchal structure, in that there is no concept of content existing inside a parent category. Instead, pages have one or more category attached to them. For example, if you look at the bottom of the page on DTS curriculum, you will see that it has the categories DTS, History and Training attached to it. This means that if you go to any of these categories, you will see a link to the DTS curriculum article.

[[Image:Category list.png|thumb|left|200px]]Category List
To see a list of each category in the wiki, click the Categories link in the navigation column to the left. Fifty category titles are listed per page, with links at the top and bottom of the page for viewing the next fifty. Note that whenever a link is displayed in red, this means that the page linked to does not yet exist. If you have something to say about such a category, feel free to be the first to add content there!

Category Cloud[[Image:Category cloud.png|thumb|right|200px]]
On the main page there was a section titled Categories, with a seemingly random collection of links of varying sizes. This is what is called a tag cloud. Every category with five or more pages tagged to it appears in this section, and the more pages, the bigger the link. This gives a convinent visual overview of the entire content of the wiki.

[[Image:Search results.png|thumb|left|200px]] Searching
If you are not sure what categories the information you are looking for might be in, or the category in question is too large to quickly browse, then searching will be the easiest way to find the information. Located on the top right corner is the search box. If you know the exact article name, type that and click "Go" to be taken directly to that article. Otherwise, type any applicable key words in the text box, and click "Go".

On the search results page, you will see a list of matching pages, with excerpts from each. The results are seperated into two sections: articles with matching text in the title, and pages with matching text in the content. Notice that as with the category list page, links are located above and below the results for navigating to the next set.

If you were not able to locate what you were looking for with your initial search, you can refine your search with options located at the bottom of the page. For example, if you think what you are looking for might be in the talk namespace, then check that field to include it in your search (more on the talk section latter).