Help:Editing

From Van Hamel wiki

Under construction. The following guidelines may be out of date.

General

Text can be formatted using MediaWiki markup, the syntax of which may differ from that employed for HTML or XML. Fortunately for us, the basics of using wiki markup to edit wikis are already explained in some detail on the MediaWiki website. See the following pages to begin with:

• Help:Editing pages
• Help:Formatting

The purpose of this page is to offer a quick reference for commonly used markup features as well as some additional information specific to this website.

The first steps

WikEd

Before plunging into some serious editing work, users may first want to install the text editor WikEd for one's user account and learn some of the basics of MediaWiki syntax.

WikiEd is a text editor designed to facilitate editing wikis. See Help:wikEd for instructions on how to install it for your user account.

Experimenting with sandboxes

It may take some time to get used to the syntax used by Mediawiki. You can experiment by creating a so-called 'sandbox', that is, a page which does not belong to the 'article space' intended for our readers and so may be used to perform a number of tryouts or create drafts. The most appropriate place to start a sandbox is a subpage of your user space, such as this one.

Markup

Formatting text

See Help:Formatting for a more comprehensive overview of MediaWiki markup

Rendered text	Markup text	comment
italics	''italics''
bold	'''bold'''
bold and italics	'''''bold and italics'''''
line break	To create a newline, add <br/ > at the end of the previous sentence.

Section headings

See mw:Help:Formatting#Level_2 and Wikipedia

A primary section heading is written ==Title==, while a subsection below it is written ===Title===, and so on (a maximum of five levels is possible).

Links

See further mw:Help:Links

MediaWiki distinguishes between at least two basic types of links:^[1]

1. internal links, i.e. links to other pages in the wiki
2. external links, i.e. links to other websites

Rendered text	Markup text	comment
Book of Leinster	[[Book of Leinster]]	Internal link
Lebor Laignech	[[Book of Leinster|Lebor Laignech]]	Internal link under a different title
http://www.ucd.ie/tlh	http://www.ucd.ie/tlh	External link
Thesaurus Linguae Hibernicae	[http://www.ucd.ie/tlh Thesaurus Linguae Hibernicae]	External link under a name different from the url

Images

See Help:Images

Tables

For now, see Help:Tables

Redirects

For Wikipedia's manual, see Wikipedia:Redirect

For easier navigation, so-called 'redirects' may be created to ensure that typing in an alternative title, shorthand (e.g. Egerton 88) or abbreviated title (e.g. LL) in the search box will directly take the reader to the intended article. For instance, it has been convenient to ensure that Egerton 88 redirects to London, British Library, MS Egerton 88. This was done by (1) creating the page for Egerton 88 (don't press 'save' yet), (2) typing in #REDIRECT [[London, British Library, MS Egerton 88]] and (3) finally, by saving the article.

Internal links to Egerton 88 will also take the reader to the primary target. In this case, however, it is preferable to create a direct link in the following way: [[London, British Library, MS Egerton 88|Egerton 88]]. This will reduce server load.

Some redirects will be placed in one or several categories. See below for further information.

Creating, moving and deleting articles

Under construction

Notes

Useful links

Editing pages, MediaWiki.

Editor help (various pages), Wikipedia. Although Wikipedia maintains certain editing policies which do not apply here, this page also deals with syntax for editing pages.