[Home]How does one edit a page

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It's very easy to edit a wiki page. Simply click on the "edit" link at the top or bottom of a wiki page. This will bring you to a page with a text box containing the text of that wiki page. Then type away, and press "Save" when finished!

Now, the rest of this page is a demonstration of various wiki techniques. After the first few sections, you will have to "teach yourself" by pressing the "edit" link (above and below) to see for yourself how various effects were achieved!

Usemod wiki experts: please add to this page as new features are activated/discovered. (There are varieties of wiki software. Wikipedia is a "Usemod" wiki, courtesy CliffordAdams.)

Make a new page

Two ways to make a new page:

  1. Edit an old page and put [[ before the name of the new page, and ]] after the name. For example, you would type: [[my page]] . Then save the old page and return to the [[my page]] link you created. It will appear with a question mark after it, like this: [my page]? . Click on the question mark; that will open up the new page. Replace "Describe the new page here." with whatever text you want to put on the page!
  2. Type the name of the old page in the "address" line of your browser and hit return. For example, in the URL above, you would replace http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/How_does_one_edit_a_page with http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Name_of_your_new_page and then hit return. Notice that spaces in the title are converted into underscores ( _ ). If you type spaces rather than underscores in your title, it won't work. Be sure to make the first letter of your page upper case, or no one will be able to link to it!

Naming pages

Here are some important notes about naming pages:

Stylistically, this wiki seems to be converging to a consensus that free links are nicer.) In sum, examine the following examples. Good URLs:
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/My_new_page
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Bacteria
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/JimboWales
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Platos_Republic
Bad URLs:
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/My new page
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/my_new_page
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/bacteria
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/jimbowales
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Plato's_Republic
Good links:
[[my new page]]
[[My new page]]
JimboWales
[[Platos Republic]]
[[Platos Republic|Plato's Republic]]
Bad links:
[[my_new_page]] (underscores not necessary)
[[My_new_page]] (underscores not necessary)
jimbowales (needs two capital letters)
[[Plato's Republic]] (will not link to the page you want it to link to)
See naming conventions when choosing names for pages!

Demonstration area

New paragraphs are made by simply pressing the "enter" or "return" key twice. If you press it just once, like this, a new paragraph will not be made (as you can see).

Here is
the proper way
to make single-spaced lines.

This line is indented.
This line is indented even farther.
Who knows how far it can go?

 This line is indented, but since I didn't use a colon ( : ) 
 at the beginning of the line, it appears as a monospace font.  
 In other words, if you begin a paragraph with a space, that 
 line will be both indented and in a monospace font.
 (Also, this line will not wrap!  It will simply increase the width of your window.)

This line is in italics.
And so is this one! (Using different code!)
And this! (Using still different code! How versatile!)

This line is bold.
So is this one!

Here is an old style link: HomePage
Here is a new style link: Larry Sanger (see Free Links)
the text of this link is different from the name of the page it links to
it really doesn't MatterWhat youType in the...link description. It's all linked!
An external link: http://www.nupedia.com/about.shtml
Another external link: [Nupedia about page]

You don't have to create weird page titles, like Platos?, just to make the plural or possessive form of a name. You can write: Plato's. In the old system you'd do it like this: JimboWales's homepage (using "").

Here is a numbered list:

  1. Item 1
  2. Item 2
  3. Item 8
 #Notice, this line isn't numbered because it's not flush left.
#Neither is this line

Here is a bulleted list:

You can make a line on a page:


Or two, if you wish:

There are two ways to display, rather than parse, wiki code:

  1. you can use the <code> tag
  2. you can use the <nowiki> tag
(We made liberal use of the <code> tag on this page.)

You can (and should!) create subpages: /Talk
You can link to other subpages: Charlize Theron/Filmography or even charlize Theron/Filmography but please, not [Charlize Theron/filmography]? .

We can do tables:
Item one Item two
Item three Item four

Fancy table:
Item one Item two
Item three Item four
Item five

Here's another way to make a table: ||||||Heading|| ||cell 1||cell2||cell 3|| ||cell 1||||spanning 2 columns||
(We haven't implemented that way of doing tables, as you can see.)

A few special characters
129ü
130é
160á
161í
162ó
163ú
164ñ
165Ñ

You can make superscripts and subscripts and you can control the font size and color!

If you want to redirect traffic going to one page to another page (with a better title, for example), then use the command #REDIRECT [[pagename]] at the top of the page. See LarrysText for an example. We are planning to automate the conversion of links from the old style, LikeThis, to the new style, [like this]?. In the meantime, you can use the #REDIRECT [[pagename]] function.

Practice editing pages in our SandBox!


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Last edited March 3, 2001 12:46 pm (diff)
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