How does it work?

From NMR Wiki

This article focuses on explaining workings of the Mediawiki version of wiki software, which will be referred in text as simply "wiki". Mediawiki is the software used by Wikipedia
Further, this website runs customized version of software, so some of the information here is specific to this site.

Wiki is the website that can be edited directly from the web browser. Editing requires no knowledge of html or any sort of programming language.

Each wiki page comes with tabs on top of it: "article" tab selects the main view; "discussion" - selects a so-called "talk-page" which provides area for discussions related to the article content.

Basic editing. You will have "edit" tab unless the page's content is protected by the system administrator (also in case page is split in sections, each section will have a separate "edit" link). Once you select the "edit" tab you can start editing the page. There are some rules to editing, most of them are described on the help page in sections "General editing", "Special stuff" and "Even more documentation" sections.
... and at the bottom there will be a "Save" button. That's mostly it.

Checking recent changes. Click on "Recent changes" link in the navigation bar and see what has been edited recently.

Protecting content. Since wiki can be edited by anyone it makes sense to protect it's content in some way. There are several ways of protecting content. (1) If you are curious, log out (in case you are logged in of course) and try to edit this page by inserting [http://www.cnn.com] somewhere and click save button. A simple math "challenge" will be given to you. This stops absolute majority of automatic spam postings. (2) Also, each page has "history" tab which allows to compare page versions and undo changes. Most of the time it is also easy to just edit out unwanted changes. (3) If you'd like to monitor content of certain page - you can post a "watch" on it - by selecting the "watch" tab. Now you will receive an email alert whenever the page is modified by someone else (you might need to edit your account preferences to receive these emails)