Revision as of 07:57, 2 November 2006

General Help

• This page on the MediaWiki homepage may be helpful:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Contents

• Help for wiki reading
• Help for wiki editing

Editing Tips

• Insert empty lines to get paragraph breaks.

• Put an asterisk * at the very start of a line to make it a bullet item.

1. Put a pound sign # at the very start of a line to make it a numbered item.

• If you want to create an indented line:

Put a colon : at the very start of a line to indent that line. Notice that if the line is long enough to reach the right margin, the entire paragraph will be indented. This indent continues until you create a new line in edit mode using your Enter/Return key.

Two colons :: at the start of a line with no spaces between them will increase the indent.

More colons ::: increases it more.

• One or more colons and an asterisk starting a line :::* creates an indented bullet.

• To Italicize something, put two single quotes '' before and after it.

• To Bold something, put three single quotes ''' before and after it.

• With JavaScript and Images turned on (the default settings), most web browsers will display helpful buttons at the top of the editing window that automatically create headers, etc.

• Put an equals symbol = at the start and end of a line to make it a section title.

• Add more equals symbols to make subsections.

One equals symbol: Major Section, level 1

Two equals symbols: Sub-section, level 2

Three equals symbols: Sub-subsection, level 3

Four equals symbols: Sub-sub-subsection, level 4

• Note that any wiki page containing three or more subsections has an automatically generated and updated Table of Contents (TOC) with section and subsection numbering at the top of the page. This automatic TOC can not be edited, and doesn't show up in the edit box.

• You can experiment with editing just by clicking "edit" and typing something in, and then clicking "Show preview" at the very bottom (rather than "Save page") to see what your changes look like. If you don't like how it came out you can scroll down to the edit window and continue editing or at the very bottom of the page just click on "cancel" to the right of "Save page" to bail out completely without making any permanent changes.

• Even if you save changes you don't like, it's easy in the wiki interface to revert to previous versions. See the "history" function at the very top to get a sense of that. History is also great for finding out who made which changes and comparing different versions with colors to show which parts are different.

• Be sure to also check out the "Recent changes" item in the "navigation" menu on the left. With that feature you can quickly see what has been written on the entire site, rather than looking up each item individually.

How To Create A New Topic

An easy way to create a new topic is to simply put the name you'd like it to have inside double square brackets, and click Save Page. That will create an empty page, and a link to it that will be red in color until there is content at that location. To create the content, just click on the red link (which takes you to that empty page and puts you in Edit mode) and then type in the content. When you click Save Page for that, the link to it will change to blue color.

Questions

If you have questions about how to use wiki, this would be a great place to ask them since others could see and learn from them too.

Converters

HTML to Wiki

• Here are converters that will magically transform HTML (web) pages (including tables) into Wiki pages:

http://www.uni-bonn.de/~manfear/html2wiki-tables.php

To use it: open the HTML file in an editor such as Mozilla's free open-source Seamonkey, view it in HTML mode, highlight and then copy it, paste it into the top window of the converter website, click the Convert button, then highlight and copy it from the bottom window. To place the converted table on a wiki page, click the edit button on that page, position the cursor where you want the table, and paste the table into the edit window and then click Preview to make sure it worked as you wanted.

http://diberri.dyndns.org/wikipedia/html2wiki/index.html

Different interface, and different conversion results. Possibly easier to use, since you can use the method described above or put in web addresses of the page(s) to convert. Seems to handle more HTML tags, so fewer glitches need manual fixing after conversion.

Word to Wiki

Here is a converter that will magically transform Word (.doc) pages (including tables) into Wiki pages:

• The Macro is to be used with OpenOffice.org free-libre-open-source MS Office-compatible software.

The explanation is in french, but one doesn't need to understand french to use the macro : the only french sentence you need to know is “Copier pour Wikipédia”, which means “Copy to Wikipedia” ;-)

Here's one in English. It's for Word, but will probably run in OpenOffice and maybe NeoOffice (Mac). If anyone would like to test and tweak it, please update this page accordingly.

• Word2MediaWikiPlus