Help:Editing

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Forum: The Situation Room

One of the great things about a Wiki is the simplicity with which it can be edited. You don't need to know HTML code to edit an article, all you need to know is English and a simple wiki code. Best of all, you don't even need to register or log in to edit articles.

To find out how you can help, visit The Bullpen, a project page that lists all the articles which need editing or creating. For more specialized information on the page layout and writing style, see our Manual of Style.

Contents 1 Getting started 2 Basic editing 2.1 More linking techniques 2.2 Adding & linking categories 3 Advanced editing 4 Saving 5 Testing 6 See also

Getting started

To start editing an article, you need to click on the edit button, which is at the top of each page. Once you get to the editing screen you will see the editing box. The editing box is where you will type your text.

Just type the text as you would on a word processor. You can also type in the simple wiki code to format text, make links, add pictures, and so on. There are also buttons above the editing box that add in common wiki code.

If you see something interesting on a page, you can always click the Edit or View Source link at the top to see how it was done. Feel free to copy, paste, and edit!

Basic editing

Above the editing box you will find several editing buttons:

• Bold button. This button will make highlighted text bold. Another way to make text bold is to put three apostrophes (single quotes) on each side of the text you want bold.

• Italic button. This button will make highlighted text italic. Another way to make text italic is to put two apostrophes (single quotes) on each side of the text you want italicized.

• Internal link button. This button will link a word to an article of the same name inside Wiki 24. Another way to create an internal link is to put a pair of brackets [['''Kim Bauer''']] around the word you want to make a link.

See below for more linking techniques.

• External link button. This button will make a link to an external web page. Another way to create an external link is to put [http://www.example.com] around the website address.

Advanced technique: Instead of using a pipe, use a space to control the look of external links. For instance, this: [http://www.fox.com/24 Fox's Official Website] will appear on the page as this: Fox's Official Website.

• Level 2 Headline button. This button will start a level 2 headline, the biggest headline, used for the top-level sections. Another way to create a Level 2 Headline is to put ==Headline Title== around the headline title.

Advanced technique: Add more equal signs for smaller headlines. When a page has four or more headlines, it will automatically generate a Table of Contents at the top.

• Embedded Image button. This button will add an image to your article. Another way to create an Embedded Image is to put [[Image:Example.jpg]] around your image title.

Advanced technique: Use pipes to add modifiers to the image. Modifiers include thumb, size in pixels (e.g. 200px), left, right, and so on. You can also add a caption. For instance: [[Image:Example.jpg|200px|right|thumb|This is an example]] will produce an image scaled to 200 pixels, on the right hand side of the page, with "This is an example" as a caption.

• Media File Link button. This button will create a link to a non-image media file.

• Mathmatical Formula button. This button will allow you to add a mathmatical formula to the text.

• Ignore Wiki Formatting button. This button stops the highlighted text from following the wiki code format. Useful for writing pages like this one.

• Signature button. This button will add your timestamp and the date. Please use this to sign your posts in The Situation Room and on Talk pages. You can also type in four tildes: ~~~~

• Horizontal Line button. This button will add a horizontal dividing line on the page. We suggest you use this feature sparingly.

More linking techniques

As described above, you can link to another Wiki 24 article by typing a pair of brackets [[Kim Bauer]] around the name of that article. More advanced techniques (adding a pipe, linking to sections, linking to Wikipedia, and linking to other Wikia articles) are detailed here:

• Adding a pipe ( | ) allows you to control how a link appears.
  For instance, this: [[24: The House Special Subcommittee's Findings at CTU|FaCTU]] will appear on the page as this: FaCTU.
  • The pipe is often used to shorten a character's name while still linking correctly: both [[Teri Bauer]] and [[Teri Bauer|Teri]] link to the same article.
  • You can also use a pipe to hide anything before a colon or in parenthesis. This can be useful when linking to pages with disambiguation tags. For instance, this: [[Maggie (One Shot)|Maggie]] will appear on the page as this: Maggie.

• To link to a page section, add a pound sign and the heading, like so: [[Graem Bauer#Day 5]] will create a link directly to Graem's activity during Day 5: Graem Bauer#Day 5. You can also add a pipe as described above to change the appearance: [[Graem Bauer#Day 5|Graem during Day 5]] gives Graem during Day 5.

• Linking to Wikipedia simply requires the "wikipedia:" prefix; [[wikipedia:Glock 17|Glock 17]] produces Glock 17.

• To link to other Wikia pages, use "w:c:" followed by the URL prefix, for example [[w:c:starwars:Jar Jar Binks|Jar Jar Binks)]] (Jar Jar Binks at Wookieepedia) or [[w:c:tardis:Tom Baker|Tom Baker]] (Tom Baker at Dr. Who wiki).

Adding & linking categories

For a list of categories, see: Categories

To add an article to a category, insert the name of the category in a link like this at the bottom of the article page:

[[Category:Characters]]

To add more than one category, simply list them all, like so:

[[Category:Characters]]

[[Category:CTU characters]]

Articles are sorted on category pages in alphabetical order. To list an article by a different name (e.g. Bauer, Jack), use a pipe. When adding categories for people, please be sure and use this technique to sort them by surname:

[[Category:Characters|Bauer, Jack]]

To link to a category without the current article being added to that category, add a colon right after the first pair of brackets in the category link, like this:

[[:Category:Dawn Brigade separatists|Bierko's men]]

If this example were used on Jack Bauer's page, it would permit users to click and view the list of terrorists within that category, but would appropriately ensure that Jack would not himself be categorized in (added to) that list of terrorists. Jack would be added to the list if the colon was not at the start of the link.

To make an article move to the top of a category, add an asterisk (*) following the pipe:

[[Category:Day 2 characters|*]]

This should only be done when an article is very pertinent to the category, but isn't technically a member of it by definition. The example above applies to the Day 2 antagonists article, which isn't a page about a specific character, but lists information about a sub-set of those characters. It would not be appropriate for a list of information to be alphabetized among character articles, so an asterisk is used.

Advanced editing

• To rename a page, click Move at the top of the page (between History and Watch). Note: You must be logged in to move a page. A redirect page will be created automatically, so moving a page does not break links. The page's history and talk will be moved along with it.

• To revert a page to a previous version:
  • Click on the history tab
  • Click on the date stamp of the version you want
  • Click on the edit tab
  • Choose "Save Page." You can also do any editing you want before saving. Either way, it's polite to include a note in the Summary box mentioning that your edit is a revert and stating your reasons.

• To suppress the "Edit" links that appear to the right of each heading, add __NOEDITSECTION__ to a page. This is useful for short pages that utilize headers. Users will still be able to edit the page by clicking the regular edit tab on top for the entire article.

• If you have added a picture and there is not enough text to separate one section from another, you should add <br clear="right"> or <br clear="left"> (depending how the picture is aligned) directly above text or heading which is below the image. The preferred template, {{-}}, clears both. This is generally done to prevent the unsightly problem of the next heading from running into the picture. If there is enough text to separate the sections already, the tag will not add space. (For an example of only the left side being cleared, see United States Marshals Service.)

Saving

Once you have written your text, you can either save the page or show preview. We suggest that you always choose the show preview button before saving the text. However, remember that whatever happens, you or someone else can always edit your work later.

It may be useful to include an edit summary in the text box, to let others know what you did.

Testing

If you want to try something out just to see how it looks, you can use the Sandbox. The sandbox is just for experimenting, so any changes made to it are expected to be temporary. It can be useful for getting feedback on something new before making real changes to an encyclopedia page, or for testing things in different browsers.

See also

• Starting a page
• Find material to edit
• MediaWiki's editing help
• Wiki 24's community portal
• Wiki 24's general help
• Wiki 24's Manual of Style
• Wiki 24's policies
• Wiki 24's vandalism policy