The collaborative Web site is called a "Swiki", so you may see references to how to do something in "the Swiki."
If you look at the bottom of every page in the Web site, you'll see a collection of buttons. These buttons provide access to the features that let you change the Web site. The features provided by the buttons are also available in the navigation links on the left side of the page. Most important is the Edit button, which lets you edit the current page you are viewing. You can change a page so that only you can modify it by using the Lock button. To see what pages point to the current page, you can use the Refs button. If you want to see how the current page has changed over time, press the History button which will show each time a page was edited. The Top button is a quick way to jump back to the main page in the site. Changes is another useful button that lets you see the recent changes. This provides a quick way to find new pages and see which old pages have changed. The Uploads button provides a place where you can add new files to the swiki. This lets you keep shared files on the site so you can access them from different machines. You can search for a specific piece of text using the Search button. Finally, for a more detailed explanation of how the swiki works, you can press the Help button.
Modifying the Web pages in the swiki is simple. Go to any page and press the Edit button. The first time you do this, you'll be asked to enter user name and password. This is because the class swiki is configured so that only class members can modify the pages. Right below the title is a large box for entering text. You'll see the current contents of the Web page in this box. Change the text or add as much text as you like. When you press the Save button, your changes will be saved and you'll see the updated version of the page.
You'll notice that you can edit the "main" text of the page. The navigation links on the left side are the same for every page and won't be changed using the "Edit" feature. Customizing the navigation area is a more advanced feature and isn't discussed here.
Most of the pages you'll type are plain text. Simply type the text that you want into the edit box. You begin a new paragraph by pressing return twice, otherwise you'll get one long paragraph. You can create a link to a new page by surrounding the title with *s. The swiki create a link to the page if it exists, or you can create a new page if it does not exist. For example, if you type *Test Page*, you will add a link to the page called "Test Page". If it doesn't exist yet, you can create it. There are more elaborate formatting rules, which are discussed on the help page. If you know HTML, you can use any HTML tags you want, but there are ways to format text without using any HTML.