Help:Editing

de: Hilfe:Bearbeiten, fr: Aide:Edition, it: Aiuto:Modifiche

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Help:Editing — simple editing is one of the major benefits of using a wiki. Users can edit pages without knowing HTML, and still use many of the formatting features of HTML. Please feel free to experiment with these help features in the WikiIndex:Sandbox.

The MediaWiki software (the wiki software that is used here at WikiIndex) uses a special wiki markup language that is quite intuitive, and very easy to learn. However one can also use HTML tags. That is handy in case wiki syntax does not provide a needed formatting feature. This 'Help:' page provides an overview of editing on this WikiIndex wiki site.

Basic text

Most text does not require any special changes for wiki editing. A few basic rules are:

• Do not routinely indent paragraphs;
• Leave one single blank line between paragraphs;
• To create a horizontal line, type four (4) or more hyphen (-) characters;
• There is no need to encode HTML characters like <, >, & or ".

Bold and italic text

To mark text as bold or italic, or bold and italic, put the required number of apostrophies or inverted commas (') before and after those parts – two for italic and three for bold. For example:

''italic''
'''bold'''
'''''bold+italic'''''

Note that MediaWiki (like most wiki software) processes wiki syntax line-by-line, so if, for example, you want three bold lines of text, so you will have to format every line separately.

Headings

Headings are delimited by one-to-six (1–6) equal signs (=). They basically correspond to HTML's <h1> through <h6> tags.

= Headline of first order =
== Headline of second order ==
=== Headline of third order ===
==== Headline of fourth order ====
===== Headline of fifth order =====
====== Headline of sixth order ======

Note that first-order headings are not normally used in MediaWiki-powered sites.

Lists

Lists are made by preceding list items by asterisk signs (*) for bulleted lists, or the hash number signs (#) for numbered lists.

Simple lists:

* Text for a bulleted list item.
** Text for second-level list.
*** Text for third level, etc.

...which looks like:

• Text for a bulleted list item.
  • Text for second-level list.
    • Text for third level, etc.

Numbered lists:

# Text for a numbered list item.
## Text for second-level list.
### Text for third level, etc.
## Another Text for the second level.

...which looks like:

1. Text for a numbered list item.
   1. Text for second-level list.
      1. Text for third level, etc.
   2. Another Text for the second level.

Indented text

To indent paragraphs, preceed the first word of the appropriate paragraph text with colon marks (:); use several colons to obtain several levels of indentation.

Simple indented text:

: Text to be indented (quote-block)
:: Text indented more
::: Text indented to third level

...which looks like:

Text to be indented (quote-block)

Text indented more

Text indented to third level

Pre-formatted text

Individual words or lines of text can be displayed as pre-formatted (with fixed-pitch width or 'typewriter'-font) text, by placing one or more spaces at the start of the line of text. Other wiki formatting (like wikilinks) will be applied to this form of pre-formatted text.

Additionally, multi-line sections can be marked as pre-formatted text using lines starting with <pre> (to start pre-formatted text), and </pre></tt> (to end pre-formatted text). The <pre> and </pre> tags are not displayed in the rendered text. Wikilinks, and other wiki formatting is not carried out within a pre-formatted section. If wiki formatting is still required, use spaces at the start of the line instead of the <pre> and </pre> HTML tags.

For instance, when using the <pre> and </pre> HTML tags:

Pre-formatted section here.  No other link
  or format processing
is done on pre-formatted sections.
For instance, [[signature]] is not a link here.

whereas:

  This is the starting-spaces version of
  pre-formatted text.  Note that links like
  signature still work.

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See also

• Help:Contents — the 'index' of all help pages here on WikiIndex.