Help:Editing
From Eccentric Flower
If you need the full-bore MediaWiki editing help, go here - but try the information below first.
Contents |
Things You'll Probably Need
Basic Markup
- For italics, enclose the text in ''two single quotes''. Do not break the italicization across lines. If you need that, use HTML tags.
- For bold, enclose the text in '''three single quotes'''. Again, do not break across lines; use HTML tags to bold a multi-line block.
- For bold+italic, enclose the text in '''''five single quotes'''''. Same rules apply.
- If you want to treat text absolutely literally , surround it with <pre> and </pre>. The <pre> tags will automatically display text, such as code listings, in an inset block, and will ignore MediaWiki markup. It will also keep original line breaks, leading spaces, etc.
This is what a literal block looks like.
But those lines don't wrap by themselves. If you want to mark long-line text as being a quotation and you want it to be in a nice blue block like I do it, see {{Quote}} and {{Unquote}} in the Templates section below.
- If you leave any empty space at the beginning of a line, it'll act as if you put it in <pre></pre> tags.
- If you just want a block of normal text without MediaWiki interpretation, use the <nowiki></nowiki> tags.
- And if you just want something in monospace, use <tt></tt>.
Paragraph Handling
Leave blank lines between paragraphs and MediaWiki will do the right thing. A single newline will generally not do what you want.
If you need to create short lines,
or otherwise wrap lines yourself,
use HTML <br/> tags.
Links to Other Sites
- Usually you just want to type the bare URL, with no other formatting, like this: http://www.example.com/ - if it starts with http:, the wiki will do the right thing.
- If you put the URL by itself in square brackets - [http://www.example.com/] - it will turn into a cite link, like this: [1]
- BUT, if you put the URL and then a space and some link text in the square brackets - [http://www.example.com/ Example] - it does this: Example
Links to Internal Pages
Should you need to link to other pages inside this wiki, the formatting for doing that is just different enough from outside URLs to be confusing. It confuses even me sometimes. So read carefully.
- A basic link to other pages in the wiki is written like this [[Page_Name_Here]]. Notice: two brackets instead of one!
- If you do this and it comes out red, it means you got the page name wrong (it's telling you the page doesn't exist - presumably you are trying to link to one which does). The page name is everything after index.php/ in a page's URL.
- To make a page link say something other than the page name, use [[Page_Name|Link caption]]. Notice the vertical bar!
Signature
Although revision/authorship history is kept for all changes, you are expected to explicitly sign your work; to do this, use four tildes in a row ~~~~. This will be replaced by your user name and a time stamp when the page is saved, like this: Columbina 14:50, 18 June 2009 (EST)
Things You Probably Won't Need
These are for me, but this seemed like the logical place to put them.
Headings
Surround heading text with equals signs to turn it into a section heading.
You probably don't want a level 1 section heading, because it will turn into the page title.
== This is how to write a level 2 heading. ==
Level 3 has three equals signs, so on down to level 6.
"Table of Contents" blocks get generated automatically for a page that has more than three headings.
Help on section handling and TOCs, including how to suppress them.
Headings should go on their own lines.
Lists
- For an unordered (bulleted) list, start a line with an asterisk. Deeper levels start with two asterisks, three, etc. In general, each list item needs to be on a single line, with no blank lines between list items, unless you plan to get tricky (see the full markup examples page, above).
- For an ordered list, start lines with a pound sign, two pound signs, etc. Same rules.
- Don't put spaces before the list markers (the pound signs or asterisks). As noted above, MediaWiki treats a line with leading spaces ...
* ... exactly as if you had used <pre>, which is probably not what you want.
Templates
Templates are predefined blocks of text or formatting which you can drop into another wiki page by calling their names. Here's how you would type a template insertion with no parameters: {{Template_name}}.
Template:Update takes a message: {{Update|message}}.
To do something similar with a longer block of information for quoted text, I have Template:Quote and Template:Unquote, which are used like this:
{{Quote}}
big chunk of quoted text goes here
{{Unquote}}
The result looks like this:
Template:Hover takes two arguments, the hover text and the real text, and shows the text with dotted underlines and a message when you roll over it. Use like this: {{Hover|Hover text|Real text}}.
Template:JBC takes two arguments; the first is the link text for a "breadcrumb" and the second is the page which will be linked within the Eccentric_Flower namespace. {{JBC|Eccentric Flower|Contents}} becomes «Eccentric Flower
Template:BC is the same deal as JBC but the second parameter is the complete page name (i.e. in the Main namespace unless specified).
Categories
To put a page into a particular category, make an internal link into the Category: namespace - this can be done anywhere on the page, but convention puts it at the bottom. Like this: [[Category:Name_of_category_here]].
A page can be in more than one category. Putting a page in a category that hasn't been created yet will automatically create the category. Remember to check the list of all existing categories before doing this.
