On 19/07/07, Berto 'd Sera albertoserra@ukr.net wrote:
Hoi,
Not an easy answer. In piedmonetese we first made a small sequence of explanations about how to structure text and add images. It helps if you step out of geek terms and use the terminology coming from the handcraft of your culture (something about decoration of objects and related tools), so people get the message quick. At that point you can have people write plain text and add images, while admins volunteer to study the markup more in depth and start to produce small user guides. It takes patience and care for people's reactions.
Mediawiki markup is - by the standards of markup languages - really quite simple; [[-]] for links, ''-'' for emphasis. Everything else you can label "advanced stuff" and not worry about to start with! Check the keyboard does have those characters, mind you... but once you figure out how to get the idea across, the very basics of the language are simple.
(Perhaps a good second stage is headers == and [[Image:...]]; a third stage might be fancier formatting, :: and *. After that you're into stuff which is beyond simple "markup", you're dealing with templates...)
It might be worth seeing if there are any "really really basic guides on using HTML" that you can find - that's the most likely markup language to have simple guides written for it, and you may be able to adapt the remarks in there.