How does one edit a page

What you see in the text box will be mostly plain text, but you will see some special things the Wiki software uses to create links, lists, and other effects. The rest of this page is a demonstration of how to use these features. After the first few sections, you will have to "teach yourself" by pressing the "edit" link (above or below) to see for yourself how various effects were achieved! You can practice editing in the SandBox before taking on other pages if you like.

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.)

Adding links

Let's say that you're editing a page about sports, and you mention soccer. Well, there's probably a Wiki page about soccer (and if there isn't, there should be) and you want to make the word a link to that article. Simple: type double square brackets around it [[like this]] and continue editing. That's it! If the page already exists, a link will be made to it. If the page doesn't already exist, a link will be made that allows someone to create it. Add links liberally--that's what makes Wikipedia powerful.

There are a few rules about making these links that you might run into. Foreign characters and punctuation cannot be used in the text of a link, so if you want to make a link to "Plato's Republic", you'll have to leave out the apostrophe. Also, the Wiki software will link to a page title that is the same as the text of your link, except that the first letter will be uppercased, and spaces may be condensed. For example, if you type [[card game]], it will be linked to a page entitled "Card game".

Older versions of the Wiki software only made one-word links LikeThis, and didn't require the brackets to make them links. You may encouter these as you edit older pages. Please don't create new links like that, but you may want to leave the existing ones in place until you're more comfortable editing pages to fix them. See Free Links for more information about those. The naming conventions page contains hints about useful page names. For example, it is handy to use singular words like "game" rather than "games", because that makes it easier to create links in other pages.

Finally, sometimes the text you would like to make into a link just doesn't make a good page title. In that case, you can specify both inside the brackets separated by a vertical bar like this: [[Page link|text of link]]. This will appear as "text of link", but will link to a page entitled "Page link".

Examples of Good links:

[[my new page]]

[[My new page]]

JimboWales

[[Platos Republic]]

[[Platos Republic|Plato's Republic]]

[[my_new_page]] (underscores not necessary)

[[My_new_page]] (underscores not necessary)

jimbowales (needs two capital letters or brackets)

[[Plato's Republic]] (will not link to the page you want it to link to)

Making a new page

There are two ways to make a new page:

1. As mentioned above, while you're editing the text of an old page, you can just put something in brackets. For example, you would type: [[my page]]. When you save the page you're editing, if the link you included doesn't exist, you will see a question mark after the text. Click on that question mark and you will be taken to a newly-created page that you can edit. Replace "Describe the new page here." with whatever text you want to put on the page!
2. Type the URL of the new page in the "address" line of your browser and hit return. The URL of the new page will be the text of a link, with the first letter uppercased and spaces replaced by underscores (see Wiki Canonization for more details about this). For example, in the URL above, you would replace

Demonstration area

• What follows is an area for demonstrating the various effects possible using Wikipedia, such as bold, italics, numbered lists, etc., etc.
• Click "edit" at the top or bottom of this page (i.e., the page you are now reading!) to see how these effects were achieved!!!
• If you don't click "edit" now you won't understand what's going on!!!

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! How confusing! But any of them will do.)

This line is bold.
So is this one!

Here is a new style link: Larry Sanger (see Free Links)
Here is an old style link: HomePage
Consider not capitalizing your page names: definition of philosophy; see naming conventions
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 linkéd!
An external link: http://www.nupedia.com/about.shtml
Another external link: [Nupedia about page]

If you type in the URL of a picture, it will be displayed rather than linked to:

You don't have to create weird page titles, like Platos?, just to make the plural or possessive form of a name. [[Plato's]] wouldn't work anyway. You can write: Plato's or (more cleverly) Plato's. In the old linking system you'd do it like this: JimboWales's homepage (using ""). (Just Say No to the old linking system; after all, you can now link to Jimbo Wales's homepage!) But it does look like you're stuck with Platos Republic, because [[Plato's Republic]] doesn't work, as you can see, although if you want to type a bit more you can cleverly create Plato's Republic.

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:

• Here's an item
• Here's another item
  • We can do bullets within bullets, as it were
    • Pretty nifty, huh?

You can make a line on a page:

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

1. you can use the <code> tag

2. you can use the <pre> tag

3. you can use the <nowiki> tag

You can create subpages: /Talk
Sorry, but you cannot create subsubpages: /Talk/TalkAboutTalk?
You can link to other subpages: Charlize Theron/Filmography or even 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.)

Very often you might need to use special characters, like these: ü À α
See Wiki special characters for what you should and shouldn't do.

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

• f(x) = a₀ + a₁x₁ + a₂x₂² + a₃x₃³ + ...

• f(x) = a₀ + a₁x₁ + a₂x₂² + a₃x₃³ + ...

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. To look at the history of the old page, click on the "(redirected from OldPageName)" link at the top of the new page.

Practice editing pages in our SandBox!