Quick guide to editing pages

MediaWiki Guide

This guide is by no means extensive in any way, so refer to the wikipedia documentation for more authoritative information!

Wikifying Text

Article Links

To wikify some text (or make it a "wiki word"), wrap it in double square brackets [[thusly]] — this would lead to the word "thusly" becoming a link within the page. Clicking on the link would either take you to the article called "thusly" (if it exists), or to an edit page to create a "thusly" article. Being able to 'tag' any such text and make it a link to an article, existing or not, is one of the strengths of the wiki system — most traditional wikis simply tag any text WhichIsInterCappedWithoutSpaces. MediaWiki allows any text to be tagged using the square bracket encapsulation, and leads to a more readable form of wiki word.

Example: This document will contain [[terms and conditions]] which will need to be confirmed by the [[customer]] via our website.
Output: This document will contain terms and conditions which will need to be confirmed by the customer via our website.

You can alter the rendered output of a wiki word link by placing a pipe symbol — | — after the word(s) then enter the text you wish to be displayed.

Example: This document could contain [[privacy statement|our privacy statement]].
Output: This document could contain our privacy statement.

Outside Links

To have a URL linking to an external site, simply enter the URL into the article text; it will be automatically hyperlinked by MediaWiki.

Example: http://www.some.site/path/to/document
Output: http://www.some.site/path/to/document

To hyperlink some text, as you would with <a href>, encapsulate the URL and your link text in single square brackets, URL first and your text delimited by a space.

Example: [http://www.some.site/path/to/document Your text]
Output: Your text

Note the use of single brackets, not double as for a wiki word.

To present a hyperlink in a similar form to a footnote, encapsulate the URL alone in single square brackets with no spaces or additional text. The hyperlink will be shown inside square brackets with a number — the number shown will depend on how many previous hyperlinks have been entered in this way.

Example: [http://www.some.site/path/to/document] [http://www.another.site/path/on/the/site]
Output: [1] [2]

Embedding External Graphics

We won't go into the details of uploading images and linking to them, instead let's quickly run through how to embed a graphic from another website in an article page, in the same way you'd use <img src>.

To embed a graphic, simply enter the URL to it.

Example: http://wiki.evolt.org/stylesheets/images/wiki.png
Output:

Non-proportionally Spaced Text

To show output from an email, code or other fixed-width character text, you can show this text in a similar fashion to <pre>, simply by using the <pre></pre> tags as normal, or adding a space to the start of each line of text. Unfortunately, due to the way the HTML will be rendered from this article, you'll have to take the latter as a matter of faith, but we can demonstrate the use of <pre>.

Example: <pre>This text will be shown in fixed-width font. Line breaks will be honoured ... ... throughout the text (but not in the example).</pre>

Output:

This text will be shown in fixed-width font.
Line breaks will be honoured ...
... throughout the text (but not in the example).

Text Formatting

Diacriticals are inserted using the HTML entities, such as &eacute for é. Bold, italic, underline and so on are achieved thusly.

Example: ''Italic'' (2 apostrophes, em) '''Bold''' (3 apostrophes, strong) '''''Bold Italic''''' (5 apostrophes, em/strong) <u>Underline</u> <small>Caption Text</small> <s>Strikeout</s>
Output: Italic (em) Bold (strong) Bold Italic (em/strong) Underline Caption Text Strikeout

Showing Wiki Code, Comments

Occasionally, such as in this article, it may be necessary to expose wiki (or HTML or similar) code without wanting it to be rendered. In this case, simply encapsulate the text in <nowiki></nowiki> tags.

Example: <nowiki>[[this text is wikified]] but this isn't.</nowiki>
Output: [[this text is wikified]] but this isn't.

Comments can be made within article source in the same way as in HTML.

Example: <!-- This is a comment, it shouldn't show up in the example output -->
Output:

Miscellany

Other formatting can be used, such as <br /> tags to create a line break where necessary. A single line break after text will not result in the intended effect — either use <br /> with the actual line break in text (for readability's sake) or insert a second line break to start a new paragraph (akin to <p>).

Talk Pages

Every article has a "talk" page (accessed from the "discussion" link at the top of each article) — 'use this instead of the article page itself to discuss the article. This article's talk page, for example, can be found at Talk:Quick guide to editing pages — talk pages can be linked to as though they were a wiki article :)

Signing Your Contributions to Pages

Simply use the wikicode ~~~~ (four tildes in succession). This is rendered thusly: Neuro 08:54, 30 Nov 2004 (CST)