Wikitext Tutorial for Ask Dr Wiki

Since Medical Wikis have been attracting more attention this week we have received some great suggestions on ways we can improve this technology. We are always open minded to comments and we feel that the only way for this technology to succeed is to take input from the medical blogospshere and implement these changes.

The main complaint and concern we have heard is the difficulty in entering Wikitext. Wikitext language or wiki markup is a markup language that offers a simplified alternative to HTML and is used to write pages in wiki websites such as AskDrWiki and Wikipedia. Wikitext is very easy to learn, and most contributors can learn it quickly, but does present a hurdle that users have to cross before they start contributing.

Given this complaint we have made a short power point presentation to try to educate our users on how to enter Wikitext and we hope this will help some of our users get started.

We hope that in the future Mediawiki, which is the software that AskDrWiki and Wikipedia uses, will implement a good WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, but until then we will teach our medical contributors wikitext. After years of college, medical school, and postgraguate training we feel they can learn.