Wagn organizes information into cards.  Right now you're reading a card called "Introduction." On the sidebar at the right you see another card called "Wiki on Wheels."  Another card holds our logo image, and as you click around on green links, you'll see that nearly every webpage on Wagn.org is a card.  Cards are both our building blocks and our glue.

Every card has a unique name.  For example, there can only be one card named "Introduction."  This makes urls easy to read and links very easy to create.  Wagn further simplifies link-making by ignoring distinctions between plural and capitalized versions of names.  So if I make a quick link to introductions, for example, it will go to this card.

When there is a little triangle to the left of a card's name, clicking the name (or the triangle) opens and closes the card.  This lets us fit lots of cards onto a single page, which is a big part of the aim of Wagn - making it easy not just to create and edit information online, but to organize and reorganize it, too.

Card Types

Every card also has a type.  For example, this card is a Basic card -- the default type.  If you sign up for an account on a Wagn, you'll get a User card.  The logo in the top right is an Image card.  A card's type can determine how it's formatted, what kind of editor you see when you edit it, which searches find the card, and several other things.

Some types -- like images, users, and searches -- are built-in, but Wagn users can also create new types on the fly.

Menus / Tabs

At the top right of every card you will notice a menu with these tabs: View, Edit, Changes, Options, and Related.

The Edit tab allows you to edit the card, including changing the card's name and type -- assuming you have permissions (which are set in the Options tab).  You can also edit most Wagn text by double-clicking.  The Changes tab shows the card's revision history.  The Related tab shows lists of cards that are related to the card at hand.

Inclusions

You may have noticed that there often seem to be cards inside other cards.  We call these "inclusions". For example, here we'll include a card about the history of Wagn:

History

Wagn grew out of Grass Commons' efforts to build a consumer education site capable of organizing to the rich and variegated data we ...

You can open it and close it and, if you're logged in, edit it right there in place.  Wagneers -- people who build things with Wagn cards -- don't like writing the same information lots of times, so they put that information in a card and include it wherever they need it.  In other words, Wagn is very DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself).

As another example of inclusion, this "Introduction" card is included in the Documentation card.  If you wanted to see just the Introduction card or the "History" card standing alone, you could click on the arrow to the right of the card's name (older Wagns use a page icon).

Database-like Features

The features mentioned above are incremental improvements upon wikis.  Wagn really shines when you start to play with its more database-like ideas:

• plus cards let users connect cards to create new cards to form a third.  This is where the structure begins.
• WQL, the first wiki query language, lets you find and organize cards using plusses and other relationships.
• formatting combines inclusions, plus cards, and WQL to offer easy, dynamic form building and versatile data presentation. 

Most casual Wagn users won't ever bother getting their heads around these features, and they don't need to.  In fact, that's the idea -- you should be able to ease your way in, and go as deep as you like.  If you think you might want to go deep, try out some of the most innovative features, and perhaps even build a Wagn of your own, awesome!  Become a Wagneer!