Help:Editing

Also see the following: Help:Format, Help:Image, Help:Link, Help:List, Help:Media.

General
To edit a page, click on the "Edit this page" (or just "edit") link at one of its edges.

After adding to or changing the wikitext, it is useful to click on the "Show preview" button, which produces the corresponding webpage in your browser, but does not make it publicly available yet (not until you press the "Save page" button). Errors in formatting, links, tables, etc. are often much easier to discover from the rendered page than from the raw wikitext.

If you are not satisfied, you can make additional changes and preview the page as many times as necessary. Then write a short edit summary in the small text field below the edit box and press "Save page" when finished. Depending on your browser, pressing the "Enter" key while the edit box is not active (i.e. there is no typing cursor in it) may have the same effect as pressing "Save page".

Dummy edit
If the wikitext is not changed no edit will be recorded and the edit summary is discarded.

A dummy edit is a change in wikitext that has no effect on the rendered page. This allows an edit summary, and is useful for correcting a previous edit summary, or an accidental marking of a previous edit as "minor" (see below). Also it is sometimes needed to refresh the cache of some item in the database.

Minor edits
A Minor Edit is an edit that doesn't really change the content of a page, but rather, fixes small details or mistakes, and other such maintenance work. When editing a page, users have the option of marking the edit as minor. To do so, simply click the checkbox above the "Save page" button (as pictured) prior to saving the page. An " m " will then be displayed alongside the edit on the list of Recent Changes, the page's history, watchlists, and the user's list of contributions, thus indicating that the edit was minor. This feature is important, because users can choose to hide minor edits in their view of the recent changes to keep the volume of edits down to a manageable level.

Edits that can be marked as minor include:


 * Correcting coding errors
 * Fixing spelling or grammar mistakes (however, please note that British and American spellings should not be interchanged)
 * Fixing typos and misinformation (unless this involves significant rewriting)
 * Adding or modifying
 * Adding, exchanging or removing navigation templates or categories
 * Exchanging an image that is pending deletion for the replacement image (i.e. a blurry JPEG being replaced by a crisp PNG)
 * Maintenance work done on large amounts of pages at a time, creating floods of edits (usually, this involves one or more of the above types of edits to begin with)

Edits that should not be marked as minor include:


 * Removing, changing or adding to the written content of an article, including image captions or any other text besides the main body paragraphs
 * Incorporating Trivia and other maintenance work that involves rewriting parts of a page
 * Conducting a substantial amount of maintenance work on any given page (i.e. adding or reorganizing many templates or categories, fixing numerous grammar errors, etc.)
 * Adding or removing tables or infoboxes
 * Adding an image to or removing an image from an article, or replacing an image with a completely different image
 * Adding a gallery to an article or moving a preexisting gallery to a subpage

Please note that neither of these lists are exhaustive, with common sense being the best tool in determining whether an edit is minor or not, and when in doubt, simply do not mark an edit as minor. Remember that different users have slightly different takes on what "minor" entails, and so some may be quick to mark their edits as minor, while others may be quite hesitant to mark any of their edits. However, if a user fails to mark large amounts of edits as minor, or often marks substantial mainspace edits as "minor", they are committing a level one offense, and a may be issued to inform them of the problem. When doing so, keep in mind that the user may not have been aware they were breaking any rules, so be sure to explain the policy and possibly even link here for further reference.

The wiki markup
In the left column of the table below, you can see what effects are possible. In the right column, you can see how those effects were achieved. In other words, to make text look like it looks in the left column, type it in the format you see in the right column.

You may want to keep this page open in a separate browser window for reference. If you want to try out things without danger of doing any harm, you can do so in the Sandbox.

Sections, paragraphs, lists and lines
Summarizing the effect of a single newline: no effect in general, but it ends a list item or indented part; thus changing some text into a list item, or indenting it, is more cumbersome if it contains newlines, they have to be removed.

HTML Tables
HTML tables can be quite useful as well. For details on how to use them and discussion about when they are appropriate, see [MediaWiki User's Guide: Using tables].

Table of contents (TOC)
For each page with more than three headings, a table of contents (TOC) is automatically generated from the section headings, unless:
 * (for a user) preferences are set to turn it off
 * (for an article) in the edit box the code   is added

With or  in the wikitext a TOC is added even if the page has less than four headings.

The TOC is put before the first section header, or in the case of, at the position of this code. Thus there may be some introductory text before it, known as the "lead". Although usually a header after the TOC is preferable, can be used to avoid being forced to insert a meaningless header just to position the TOC correctly, i.e., not too low.

Preferences can be set to number the sections automatically.

In a page calling a template with sections, the sections in the template are numbered according to their position in the rendered page, e.g. if the template tag is in the third section, then the first section of the template is numbered four. Any text in the template before its first section shows up as part of the section with the template tag, and any text after the tag before a new header shows up as part of the last section of the template. This may be done deliberately, but can usually better be avoided (see also below).

Compact TOC
Where you have a large number of very short headings (such as letters of the alphabet) you can get a very long table of contents. An alternative is a compact TOC, which you can achieve by inserting the following text:

 

which looks like this:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

You can do similar things with years or decades e.g.

1900s - 1910s - 1920s - 1930s - 1940s - 1950s - 1960s - 1970s - 1980s - 1990s - 2000s

Both of the above make use of section linking, see below.

Templates
Some part of a page may correspond in the edit box to just a reference to another page, in the form, referring to the page "Template:name" (or if the name starts with a namespace prefix, it refers to the page with that name; if it starts with a colon it refers to the page in the main namespace with that name without the colon). This is called a template. For changing that part of the page, edit that other page. Sometimes a separate edit link is provided for this purpose. A convenient way to put such a link in a template is with a template like m:Template:ed. Note that the change also affects other pages which use the same template.

There are two tags that can be used in templates:
 * and . Adds text between the tags onto the template page, but not when the template is used on another page.
 * and does the exact opposite. Text between the tags will only be seen when the template is used, not on the template page itself.

Page protection
In a few cases the link labeled "" is replaced by the text "" (or equivalents in the language of the project). In that case the page can not be edited.

Separating edits
When moving or copying a piece of text within a page or from another page, and also making other edits, it is useful to separate these edits. This way the diff function can be usefully applied for checking these other edits.