A page is the primary building block in Arbital. Pages can represent content, users, meta tags, and more. This page covers or links to most page features that you'll run into as an editor.

Page settings

Alias is a short name given to the page. It's mostly used to quickly link to the page in Markdown.

Page type determines what kind of page this is: standard wiki, lens, question, answer, comment, etc... Most of the time this is set for you automatically and you can't edit it.

Vote type determines what kind of voting this page will have. Once the type is set, it can't be changed, only turned off/on.

Sort children determines how the children pages are sorted:

By Likes (default): the pages with most likes will appear first

Recent First: the most recently created pages will appear first. (Set this for your blog.)

Oldest First: the oldest page will appear first. (Set this when you are writing a sequence of posts or a book.)

Alphabetically: self-explanatory. If you name your child pages with a numerical prefix, e.g. "3. Step Three", then this option will sort them as you would expect.

Permissions

If you own the page, you will also be able to change its permissions.

Edit group determines who can edit the page. Only the members of the set group will be able to edit it.

Edit karma lock will require the user to have that amount of karma before they can edit the page.

Relationships

Parents show what pages will be the parents of this page. This page will show up under "Children" on those pages.

Children show what pages will be the children of this page. This page will show up under "Parents" on those pages.

Tags shows what tags this page has. They will show up as a list of #hashtags on the page.

Requirements shows what requirements the page has. Arbital will instruct the user to read them before reading the page.

You can read more about relationships here.

Similar pages

Arbital will display other pages that are similar to the one you are editing or creating. This way, you won't accidentally create a duplicate of another page that you didn't know existed.

Alias compilation

When a page is saved (even during auto-saves), all the aliases are converted to their corresponding ids. When the page is opened for editing, all the ids are automatically converted to corresponding aliases. This way you can change the alias on any page and don't have to worry about editing links on all the other pages, which without this feature would still use an obsolete alias.

History

When you are done editing a page, you can click "Publish" to replace the currently live version with yours. Until then, nobody will see your changes. The old versions are still stored safely on the server, and can be seen in the change log.

You can see previous versions of the page in the history tab. You can load up older versions, perform a diff, and even revert if necessary.

Autosaves

When you are editing a page, it's automatically saved every 5 seconds. When you open a page for edit, if you have an autosave, it will be loaded instead of the currently live version. You can only have one autosave at any given time. A new autosave always overwrites the old one. When you abandon a page, the autosave is deleted.

Snapshots

You can manually create a snapshot of the current version. You can have as many snapshots as you want. Use them to store potential changes / snippets for the page and to try out different paths in your writing.

When to create a new page?

When some topic / claim is not covered anywhere else.

When some topic / claim gets too complicated, you can break it down into several pages.

When you see overlapping discussions about the same thing on other blog/wiki pages, create a page to encompass all of that discussion, and bring it to this new page.

When to edit a page?

If you see a way to improve or add to the presented information.

If you see a clear mistake / typo / vandalism.
- If you are not sure if it's a mistake, leave a comment.

How to edit a wiki page?

On the page you want to edit, click on the Edit button with the pencil icon.
- If you want to create a new page, click the compose button in the bottom right corner.

Enter the page's title and clickbait.

Use Markdown syntax to edit the page.
- Don't forget to create the summary section.

Check the page settings.

Click Publish (or Preview) when you are ready for your version of the page to go live.

What makes a good Arbital page?

It's longer than a few paragraphs, but not longer than a few full screens.

It covers one question / claim / subject.

Longer pages are broken down into sections with headers.

It links to other pages that cover other sub-questions / sub-claims / sub-topics.

The relationships (parent-child, tags, requirements) are set correctly.