Help:Editing Features

EDITING WIKI PAGES To create a page which has a link on the page you are viewing, click on the link, and an appropriate edit page will be created and displayed. Enter the text you want, and save the page using the "Save page" button near the bottom. To create a page without an existing link, type the full name of the page in the search box, and click on the "Go" button. It will offer the option of creating a page by that name, which you can accept by clicking on the link provided, then proceed as above. To edit any existing page, display it. Then you simply select the edit tab at the top of the page and its edit page will be displayed. The wiki uses a different markup syntax than in HTML. It will also accept a limited set of HTML if you enter it, but not everything. For example, it doesn't handle <p> tags well, or <a href> tags at all. It will handle HTML style lists and tables, though the preferred method is to use the wiki markup syntax. Here's a quick set of basics: To create a header, use ==Section== [analogue of <h2>Section</h2>], ===Subsection=== [analogue of <h3>Subsection</h3>] or ====Subsubsection==== [analogue of <h4>Subsubsection</h4>]. Don't use =Main= instead of <h1>Main</h1>. To start a new paragraph, leave a blank line. [Analogue of </p><p>] To center a paragraph either use <center>...</center>, or <p align=center>...</p>. To force a line break use <br />. To indent, start the line with a colon ":" [Analogue of <blockquote>...</blockquote>] To create a bulleted list, start the lines with asterisks "*". [Analogue of <ul>...</ul> and <li>...</li>]. If you put two asterisks on a line, that starts an indented bulleted list, etc. To create a numbered list, use "#" instead of "*". [Analogue of <ol>...</ol> and <li>...</li>]. If you use ## on a line, that starts a doubly indented numbered list, etc. To italicize text, surround it with two apostrophes on either side ''like this''. [Analogue of <i> and </i>]. To bold text, use three apostrophes, '''like this'''. [Analogue of <b> and </b>]. To bold AND italicize, use 5 (not 4!), '''''like this'''''. Special HTML characters such as £ (the British pound sterling symbol) and © (the copyright symbol) are understood, as are numeric ones like { Links to external sites are handled like this: [http://google.com The Google site] [Analogue of <a href="http://google.com">The Google site</a>] Links to internal wiki pages are handled like this [[Page_Name|Text to display]] [Analogue of <a href="/Page_Name.html>Text to display</a>] To display text as-is, similar to the <pre> tag in HTML, start the lines with spaces. [Analogue of <pre>] Another way is to use <div id="Plaintext">...</div> To create a horizontal rule across the page, use a line containing only ---- [Analogue of <hr>] To create a partial rule, say 80% of the page width, this will work: <div style="width: 80%; margin: 0 auto; clear: both; white-space: nowrap; text-align: left; border-bottom: 1px solid #c0c0c0; margin-bottom: 1%;"> </div> [Analogue of <hr width=80%>] To make a table, use the following syntax: {| [Analogue of <table><tr>] {| option [Analogue of <table option><tr>] |- [Analogue of <tr>] | [Analogue of <td>] | option | [Analogue of <td option>] |} [Analogue of </table> <enter> [Analogue of </td> or </tr> or both] Footnoting: To do this, you need to add the text {{ref|some_name}} in the text of the outline. The "ref" stands for a reference, and the some_name needs to be a unique (for this page) name of what you are referencing. It can be a name or a number. At the bottom of the page in the References section, you would add the text "Number{{note|some_name}}" followed by whatever you wanted - links to sources, comments, multiple links, etc. Clicking on the numbers takes you to the correct reference, and clicking on the little up-arrow takes you to where it was referenced in the document. The big caveat with this system is that the notes down in the references section MUST be kept in the correct order that they are referenced in the document or the numbers will not match. There are two ways to do internal anchors and links in the wiki, but unfortunately the HTML <a name="place"> and <a href="#place"> method is not supported. * Any section heading ==Like this== or ===This=== can be referenced by [[PageName#Like_this|Text]] or [[PageName#This|Text]] or [[#Like_this|Text]] or [[#This|Text]] references. * We can add <span id="anchor1"></span> tags to the text and then reference them with [[PageName#anchor1|Text]] or [[#anchor1|Text]] references. [Analogues of <a name="place"> and <a href="pagename#place"> or <a href="#place">] __TOC__ forces a table of contents for pages with three or fewer (sub)sections. Default is none. __NOTOC__ forces no table of contents for pages with four or more (sub)sections. Default is to have one. There are ways to group or categorize pages. A simple way is to create a Category link on a page by adding text like this: "[[Category:Family Group Sheets]]". This causes a link to be placed at the bottom of the page. It also automatically creates another 'Category' page which automatically generates a dynamic list of all pages which include this tag on their page. You can add as many different categories to a page as you like. I can imagine categories such as "Family Group Sheets", "Descendants of John Whitney", "Extracts", "Census Records", etc. Another way to categorize information is a concept called 'Namespaces'. By default, there are several namespaces within each wiki. The primary one is called 'Main' and is where most of the pages you create are located. Other default namespaces are 'Help' and 'Image'. The Help namespace is where you would add pages that describe how to do things on the site, and the image namespace is where pages get created when a user uploads a file. You can configure the wiki to include custom namespaces as well. We could create namespaces for such things as Family Group Sheets, Archives, etc. One of the benefits to categorizing pages within namespaces is that when you search, you can opt to search within specified namespaces. Pages that are in namespaces other than the main namespace are prefixed by the namespace name, like this: "Help:How to Change your Preferences". To link to such pages, you simply include the namespace and the colon.