Diary of a First Timer. a.k.a., Figuring Out the Obvious.

• It was fortuitous to have been wandering around in the Administration page.
• It was fortuitous to have enough ADD to have decided to explore the Index of All Pages link on the Administration page.
• Among the 4953 pages listed, it was helpful to have had the sense (?) to wander around among the entries that begin with Wiki.. where I stumbled upon the WikiQuickStart page. The Help page makes no reference to the helpful WikiQuickStart page, presumably because the former is concerned mostly with intra-page issues.
• Eureka, there's an Add a Page list item in that QuickStart page.
• That list item suggests .. make a tiny comment, sign it by juxtaposing your first name and last name ... There is some rule of thumb in interface design, that no matter how reasonable and straight-forward is a bit of advice to the user, s/he will do something surprisingly stupid. Well, maybe I'm being too hard on myself, because, after all, the first entries in the SandBox that are clearly not the work of the The Man Behind The Curtain are annotated "By Ririan", and maybe considering that to be a signature is not completely wacky. Suffice it to say that by a process of elimination, I eventually concluded that "sign it" meant putting my name in the UserName box.
• Since the Add a Page item mentions that we'll need an "unfulfilled link", it seemed like a good idea to leave a link to my new page within the "tiny comment" I used as part of the creation process. What appears to work for that is to insert syntax of the form [[url label]], and not the form [url label] described under Markup Syntax in the Help page.
• The "unfulfilled link" and other advice given on the QuickStart page to juxtapose first and last names, taken together with the "Put two or more capitalized words together to get a WikiWord" mentioned in the WikiWord seemed to imply that a WikiWord, e.g. ThisAndThat, will be recognized as a reference to http://zhurnaly.com/cgi-bin/wiki/ThisAndThat in some contexts. So far, the only such context appears to be an unrecognized UserName.
• Having added a page wherein a critical step was signing a comment with an unrecognized UserName, believe it or not, it still wasn't quite clear what might be different when adding a new page called something else. Clearly it had to do with using an "unfulfilled link" and WikiWords. Lo and behold, all it took was adding a link to non-existent page like [http://zhurnaly.com/cgi-bin/wiki/SomethingOrOther] and clicking on it, whereupon a session opened up to edit the new page. Could not have been easier, because that happened to be the first thing I tried. I suppose some alternate version of myself might not have included the prefix "http://zhurnaly.com/cgi-bin/wiki/" in the link. So during a moment when the Spirit of Mercy gets a tighter grip one of our souls, we might scour our barrel of tricks learned along the way to decorate the text of WikiQuickStart with mention of more of the things which might be more self-evident in retrospect, than to the newbie, who at any given time considers numerous potential facts, observations and guesses about the probable Laws of Nature applicable, as tentative and subject to discomfirmation at any time.