About the UMCS Wiki

The Univeristy of Miami Computer Science department, is been the workplace of various talented individuals, passionate about the possibilities of information technologies, and making things happen.

This site is an experimentation in using a wiki as a supplemental department homepage. We hope to have collaboration with the university body, and our students particularly, to provide better information outward, and to allow the students’ views and tastes to influence us.

We will try to make the write policy as liberal as possible. The wiki will be arranged into namespaces and access will be controlled by namespace.

The cs namespace is open for write by faculty, staff and graduate students. All remaining space will be opened to all computer science majors. Users register and request write access from the site administrator. Access is granted according to this policy and can be extended beyond the policy on a case by case basis.

As described in the Dokuwiki Manual, this wiki is organized into Namespaces. A Namespace is a folder. Pages are files inside of folders, possibly inside of other folders. The colon (:) is used to write the full pathname of page, including folder names. That full name of this pages is cs:about, where cs is the namespace, and about is the page name.

Recognizing that access to pages is controlled on a per namespace basis, all wiki pages on this site must be grouped into appropriate namespaces. The cs namespace is hereby reserved for the so-called offical pages corresponding to the UMCS home page. Do not edit these pages unless you believe that your changes appropriately represent the department to the outside world.

This wiki is powered by Dokuwiki and is using an adaptation of the Minimalist Theme. We are actively hacking the Dokukwiki PHP code and the Minimalist CSS to achieve the goals of this web site. We hope to exploit the seperation of content and theme to have a continually renewed visual evolving independently from the content. We invite particpation from students.

What you need to know about all this is:

• Create a namespace, or use an existing namespace. Dokuwiki organizes information into namespaces, and access control is on a per namespace basis. For this reason, consider what control you would like on your pages and create or enter a namespace based on that consideration.

• Each namespace has a reserved page called sidebar. If it exists for the namespace, it is added to the sidebar of any page in the corresponding namespace. For instance, at the sidebar of this page you find the contents of the file cs:sidebar.