Help:Editing

What it is
So, you want to contribute to/edit or create a Wiki page? You've come to the right place. Or, rather, the right place for this Wiki. If you want to know about basic Mediawiki markup syntax (e.g. simple formatting) then go to the excellent Mediawiki formatting help page.

This page is very much a work-in-progress.

How it started
User:Bazbt3 (a wiki novice in late October 2013) decided to have a play at becoming a wiki editor. In the process the markup of a number of pages on this wiki were made unnecessarily complex. To make amends (and to impose some structure on his own editing) he decided to write this guide. It is itself, as you will see, unnecessarily complicated.

Article layout
When dividing your pages up into sections, in general please try and follow the following layout. No-one's going to hit you with a big stick if you deviate in any respect, but it's good to conform, right? Here you go (you can copy the text directly and paste it into a new page definition and see how it looks!):

What it is
(a brief description of the page subject)

How it started
(if you know the who, when, etc., it goes here)

How it works
(this is for the 'how do I participate' or the technical detail)

Links
There's a difference between a Wiki's internal and external links.

External links are formed, using the ThemeMonday page within this Wiki as an example, like this: ThemeMonday page The URL is separated from the descriptive text by a space, and enclosed within single square braces.

Internal links can be formed, again using the ThemeMonday page as an example, thus: ThemeMonday page The first ThemeMonday is the page name within the Wiki, its description is separated from it by the vertical line (look for shifted-backslash on, e.g. UK keyboards) and it's all enclosed within double square braces. To form the internal link copy the part of the page you need's URL to the right of the "...page=" in your browser's address bar.

Note: the same page is used, the only thing that's different here is the method of creating its address. In general, using the internal link structure makes it easier to create and maintain pages.

People
To link directly to an ADN user's profile (if they don't have a page here) use this format. E.g. for @svogt: @svogt

In this example the first svogt creates the clicky part of the URL. The second svogt (with an '@' prefix) creates the familiar @username display.

Categories
Category pages, e.g. Category:ADNhashtags, that automatically build a list of (in this case) hashtags used on ADN, require the addition of the following code at the bottom of your page: For a list of other categories (sparsely-populated at the time of writing) see Special:Categories.

Banners
Just as Wikipedia occasionally displays informative banners, e.g. to alert the reader to incomplete, misleading, badly-formatted, etc. articles, they can be added here.

ADN Wiki banners require 2 inputs:
 * 1) A short bit of 'alert' text (3 characters or fewer please.)
 * 2) Some text outlining the reason for the banner's placement on the page. Standard Mediawiki markup works within the banner.
 * FYI the banner code is simple due to the limitations of its author. To place non-alphanumeric characters in the 1st section the example below should be adapted where possible. It uses 3 leading & 3 trailing apostrophes to make the character bold.

Here's an example using "?" as the alert symbol: 

The markup renders like this:

Magic Words
At the bottom of a few pages the following Magic Word markup turns off the Table Of Contents (TOC) - normally displayed at the top of the page. On short, simple pages it's often superfluous. If you put the markup at the bottom it removes the problem of the sometimes-undesirable linefeed it generates: If you want to reposition the TOC, you can re-add it anywhere by using: Like this:

Please add comments
Below the edit window there's a 'Summary' text box. It's really helpful to add a brief note, e.g. "Added page." or a description of the reason for a change. For lengthier comments please use the page's Talk Page, e.g. Help_talk:Editing. (Please bear in mind that Talk pages aren't often visited.)