Difference between revisions of "Help:Editing"

Revision as of 05:49, 30 September 2012

Template:TOCright 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 in the 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's handy in case wiki syntax doesn't provide a needed formatting feature.

Basic text

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

• Do not indent paragraphs.
• Leave a single blank line between paragraphs.
• To create a horizontal line, type 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 put inverted commata (') before and after those parts – two for italic and three for bold. For example:

''italic'',
'''bold''',
'''''bold+italic'''''.

Note that MediaWiki (like most Wikis) 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 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 ======

Lists

Lists are made by preceding list items by asterisk signs (*) for bulleted lists or 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 them with colon signs (:); 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

Preformatted text

Individual lines can be displayed as preformatted (with fixed-width or "typewriter"-font) text by placing one or more spaces at the start of the line. Other wiki formatting (like links) will be applied to this kind of preformatted text.

Additionally, multi-line sections can be marked as pre-formatted text using lines starting with <pre> (to start pre-formatted text), and </pre> (to end preformatted text). The <pre> and </pre> tags are not displayed. Wiki links and other formatting is not done within a preformatted section. (If you want wiki formatting, use spaces at the start of the line instead of the <pre> and </pre> tags.)

For instance:

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

and:

  This is the starting-spaces version of
  preformatted text.  Note that links like
  Gazelle still work.

See also: Help:Contents.

de: Hilfe:Bearbeiten, fr: Aide:Edition