Each page should start with two standard elements. These should appear at the start of the page so that they are readily visible for people who are browsing through the wiki by clicking on the links in these elements. Locating them at the top of the page, before any header, also ensures that they will appear before any variable length Table of Contents for the page which Wikia may insert in the display.
Background links
The first element in a page should be a line that links to other pages that provide background for understanding this page. The background may be either topics that the reader must Know in order to make sense of the page, or topics that would be helpful if they can Recognize with them - e.g. know a single sentence definition of the topic.
- e.g. this page assumes that readers Know what wiki pages are, and it would help if they recognize what OIDs and lexicographic ordering are, but such knowledge is not essential.
- Do not list every word in the page in the Recognize list; you can assume that readers recognize terms that are covered in introductory networking courses, e.g. "packet" and "protocol", as listed in Prerequisites
- Page xxQC provides another example.
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The second element in a page should be a "Navigation table" that provides navigation links: Next, Up, Down, Previous. These links should reflect the order in which concepts are covered in the TELE9752 course, e.g. Next and Previous would link to the concept covered in the next/previous slide of a lecture.
The Navigation table should be made as a wikitext table, not as an HTML table. If the table already exists in a page that you have been allocated, then check if it is HTML (may appear with double lines around its border, or when viewed in source mode, you'll see tag) then delete it and insert a wikitext table. As a template, you can copy and paste this wikitext table (note that you might have to change the links from being to external pages to being to wiki pages):
| Up | ||
| Previous | Next | |
| Down |
Pages that are not covered in the TELE9752 course should not have, nor be included in, a Navigation Table.
The Previous and Next links show how the TELE9752 course serialises the topics, providing direction to someone who wants to learn the material, with minimal forward references. The Up and Down links show how TELE9752 provides hierarchy to topics in the course, allowing topics to be aggregated so the learner can get a high-level overview of the subject before diving into the details, and so they can understand how details relate to the "bigger picture".
- Expressed in network management terms, you can think of the wiki pages as being arranged in a tree like the Object Identifier Tree, in which each node has one parent (Up) and may have (multiple) children (Down). The pages in the tree are ordered, like the lexicographic ordering of the OID tree, with the Next link advancing through the order, and the Previous link regressing through it.
Pages in the Revisiting protocol stacks in context of network management section of the wiki provide good examples of the use of Navigation Tables. The PDF mindmap of that section File:Stack review mindmap.pdf shows the hierarchy of topics as revealed by the Up/Down cells of the Navigation Table, e.g. the subsection on layer-independent issues has children that cover the topics of options, access to layers, generic protocol functions and Internet design goals. The lecture on that section covers the topics serially, and the Previous/Next cells of the Navigation Table indicate the order of that serialisation, e.g. that the lecture starts by considering layer-independent issues and then proceeds in a bottom-up fashion through the protocol stack.
Boundary cases: The Previous and Next cells for the 1st and last slides, respectively, of a lecture should link to the last slide of the previous lecture and first slide of the next lecture, respectively.
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Similar to the wiki concept of a NavboxCould be implemented as an Infobox, e.g. the book Infobox template also has Previous and Next links