Help:Editing: Difference between revisions

If you are not satisfied you can make more 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 when finished press "Save". Depending on your system, 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".

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.

When editing a page, a logged in user has the option of flagging the edit as a "minor edit". When to use this is somewhat a matter of personal preference. The rule of thumb is that an edit of a page that is spelling corrections, formatting, and minor rearranging of text should be flagged as a "minor edit".  A major edit is basically something that makes the entry worth relooking at for somebody who wants to watch the article rather closely, so any "real" change, even if it is a single word. This feature is important, because users can choose to ''hide'' minor edits in their view of the [[Special:Recentchanges|recent changes]] to keep the volume of edits down to a manageable level.

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]].

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<td><pre><nowiki>

</nowiki></pre>

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*A newline

*in a list   

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*A newline

*in a list   

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#A newline

#in a list   

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#A newline

#in a list   

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**break lines<br>inside lists<br>like this

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**break lines<br>inside lists<br>like this</nowiki></pre>

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of definitions

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* This is primarily for displayed material, but is also used for discussion on talk pages.

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A manual newline starts a new paragraph.

</nowiki></pre>

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this is useful for:

WARNING If you make it wide,

  ENDIF

  this is useful for:

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<tr valign="top"><td><center>Centered text.</center>

<td><pre><nowiki>A horizontal dividing line: above

----

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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.

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you should sign it. You can do this by

adding three tildes for your user name:

or four for user name plus date/time:

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<td><pre><nowiki>When adding a comment to a Talk page,

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Link directly to a category, instead of adding the page to the category, by adding a colon (:) in the internal link.

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Link directly to a category,

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<tr valign="top"><td>A picture: [[Image:Mariojumpingimage.png|Appearing his trademark blue overalls, red hat and undershirt.]]

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<td><pre><nowiki>

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HTML tables can be quite useful as well. For details on how to use them and discussion about when they are appropriate, see [[http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Table 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

===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:

==Templates==

Some part of a page may correspond in the edit box to just a reference to another page, in the form <nowiki>{{</nowiki>''name''<nowiki>}}</nowiki>, 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 [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Ed m:Template:ed]. Note that the change also affects other pages which use the same template.

==Page protection==

In a few cases the link labeled "{{MediaWiki:Editthispage}}" is replaced by the text "{{MediaWiki:Protectedpage}}" (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.

[[Category:Help|{{PAGENAME}}]]

{{Shortcut|MW:EDIT|MW:SYNTAX}}