CosplayWiki:Help

From CosplayWiki

Contents 1 Introduction 1.1 Basic Text 1.2 Bold, Italic and Fixed-width Text 1.3 Headings 1.4 Lists 1.5 Indented Text 1.6 Preformatted Text 2 References

Introduction

Editing most Wiki pages is not very difficult at all. Simply click on the "edit this page" tab at the top of a CosplayWiki page (or on a section-edit link). This will bring you to a new page with a text box containing the editable text of the original page. If you just want to experiment, please do so in the sandbox, not here. You should write a short edit summary in the small field below the edit-box. You may use shorthand to describe your changes, as described in the legend, and when you have finished, press the Show preview button to see how your changes will look. You can also see the difference between the page with your edits and the previous version of the page by pressing the "Show changes" button. If you're satisfied with what you see, be bold and press the Save page button. Your changes will immediately be visible to other CosplayWiki users.

You can also click on the "Discussion" tab to see the corresponding talk page, which contains comments about the page from other CosplayWiki users. Click on the "+" tab to add a new section, or edit the page in the same way as an article page.

You should remember to sign your messages on talk pages and some special-purpose project pages, but you should not sign edits you make to regular articles. In page histories, the MediaWiki software keeps track of which user makes each change.

Simple editing is one of the major benefits of using a wiki. Users can edit pages without knowing HTML, and still use many of the formatting features of HTML. Please feel free to experiment in the Sandbox.

Basic Text

Most text does not require any special changes for wiki form. A few basic rules are:

• Do not indent paragraphs.
• Leave a single blank line between paragraphs.
• To create a horizontal line, type 4 or more minus/dash/hyphen (-) characters.
• There is no need to encode HTML characters like <, >, or &.

Bold, Italic and Fixed-width Text

To mark text as bold, italic or fixed-width, you can use the HTML <b>, <i> and code tags. For example:

<b> bold </b>, 
<i> italic </i>,
<b> <i> bold+italic </i> </b>.

Note that MediaWiki (like most Wikis) processes pages line-by-line, so if you want three bold lines of text, you will need to use three separate <b>...</b> tags. Also note that unclosed or unmatched tags are not removed from the page.

MediaWiki also implements the old "quote style" of text formatting, which is used on several wikis. Briefly:

''Two single quotes are italics'',
'''three single quotes are bold''',
'''''five single quotes are bold and italic.'''''

looks like:

Two single quotes are italics, three single quotes are bold, five single quotes are bold and italic.

Headings

Headings are delimited by 1-6 equal signs (=). They basically correspond to HTML's <h1> through <h6> tags.

= Headline size 1 =
== Headline size 2 ==
=== Headline size 3 ===
==== Headline size 4 ====
===== Headline size 5 =====
====== Headline size 6 ======

Lists

Simple lists:

* Text for a bulleted list item.
** Text for second-level list.
*** Text for third level, etc.

...which looks like:

• Text for a bulleted list item.
  • Text for second-level list.
    • Text for third level, etc.

Numbered lists:

# Text for a numbered list item.
## Text for second-level list.
### Text for third level, etc.
## Another Text for the second level.

...which looks like:

1. Text for a numbered list item.
   1. Text for second-level list.
      1. Text for third level, etc.
   2. Another Text for the second level.

Indented Text

Simple indented text:

: Text to be indented (quote-block)
:: Text indented more
::: Text indented to third level

...which looks like:

Text to be indented (quote-block)

Text indented more

Text indented to third level

Preformatted Text

Individual lines can be displayed as preformatted (fixed-width or "typewriter"-font) text by placing one or more spaces at the start of the line. Other wiki formatting (like links) will be applied to this kind of preformatted text.

Additionally, multi-line sections can be marked as pre-formatted text using lines starting with <pre> (to start pre-formatted text), and </pre> (to end preformatted text). The <pre> and </pre> tags are not displayed. Wiki links and other formatting is not done within a preformatted section. (If you want wiki formatting, use spaces at the start of the line instead of the <pre> and </pre> tags.)

For instance:

Pre-formatted section here.  No other link
  or format processing
is done on pre-formatted sections.
For instance, [[props]] is not a link here.

and:

  This is the starting-spaces version of
  preformatted text.  Note that links like
  props still work.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page
http://www.icannwiki.org/index.php?title=Basic_Wiki_Formatting