Basic Editing Assistance

This page is a brief introduction to editing this wiki.¹⁾ If you are a registered user, and just need to fill-in, edit or comment on existing wiki pages, the information here should be sufficient to get you started.

For currently registered users, your personal read/edit rights become active after you login (link in the upper-right corner). Please note that your editing rights may be limited to specific sections of the wiki. Generally speaking, if you can see the “edit this page” tab at the top (after logging-in), you can edit the page's content.

If you are not already a registered user, but are interested in helping-with/editing this wiki, please contact us.

Registered users don't necessarily have to be “wiki editors” (who directly edit wiki contents). There are numerous alternative ways to interact, and be involved, with this wiki:

• Page Subscriptions. Want to be updated automatically by e-mail when a page changes? After you login, you will see a “subscribe changes” tab appear at the top of each page. Simply click it to start receiving automatic e-mail updates when that page changes.
• Recent Changes and RSS. In addition to the page-by-page subscription option, you can view a summary of wiki-wide changes or even subscribe to receive this information via RSS. See the Recent Changes notes for more.

While editing a wiki does take some getting used to, after a bit practice you will be able to efficiently contribute to the materials. A brief introduction to editing basics is included here.

To begin editing the article you are on, and have permissions to edit, click the “edit this page” tab near the top of the screen. The page that appears allows you to edit the article you were just viewing. Notice that instead of the nicely formatted article you instead see a text window with the plain text of the article and some various symbols you didn’t see before. These symbols (e.g. ===, **, ~, {{}} ) are a form of code used by the wiki software to format the pages. While it is not necessary to memorize any wiki code (more on the alternative in a moment), it is helpful to notice what code is where, and to be careful not to erase any characters of code by accident. The example below shows how some sample wiki code (on the left) will look once the page is saved (on the right).

An alternative to memorizing code is provided in the toolbar (shown below) just above the text window. Here you will find buttons to accomplish most of the wiki’s formatting options. For example, suppose you want to make several words of a sentence italic. Highlight the words and then click the second button from the left marked “I”. Notice that your text is now surrounded by forward slashes like this: //your text// Hovering your mouse over each button will show a short description of what the button does. For further experimentation, a PlayGround is available (see the link just above the toolbar) where you can get used to wiki formatting without fear of altering the current article.

After you have made the changes you want to the article, you can click the “Save” button to immediately finish, or the “Preview” button to see what the formatted article will look like. If you like the changes you made and are finished editing, click the “Save” button and you will be taken back to the original article viewing page, your changes saved and now visible to all wiki users!

One very common editing task is creating links within a wiki page (either internally to another wiki page or file, or to a general internet web address). This process requires a bit further explanation.

There are three types of links an editor might work with:

• External Links. Most external links (to a general website address) are recognized automatically (as links) without any special syntax formatting, for example: http://www.google.com or simply www.google.com. If you want to give your link a special name, you can set a linkname with a bit of wikicode:

  [[http://www.google.com|This Link points to google]]

  This produces: This Link points to google. Note also that the editing toolbar contains a button to assist with external link syntax.

• Internal Links. To create a link to another wiki page, you will need to know the internal pagename of the page you want to link to (which may be different than the page title that appears at the top of the page). Fortunately, this is easy to find. Simply navigate to the page you want to link to, and in the footer (just above the rectangular icons) you will find the internal pagename surrounded by brackets. Simply copy this text (including the brackets) and paste into into the page you are editing (where you want the internal link to appear). That's it.
• Media Links. Media links are used to insert images into a page or create links to various files stored in the wiki (documents, etc.). The specifics are beyond the scope of these “basic editing” notes, are are outlined in detail in the Advanced Editing notes.

Wiki syntax/code is quite powerful, and offers many easy ways to format pages and content… well above and beyond simple heading and links demonstrated above. To see a more complete breakdown of the wiki syntax options editors can use, see the Formatting Syntax notes. Also, if you need to do any structural things to this wiki (add/remove/change pages, namespaces, etc.), please see the Advanced Editing Assistance notes.