Difference between revisions of "Help:Editing"

Latest revision as of 16:29, 22 November 2007

Footnotes

Footnotes are placed in the body of the letter where the marker is to appear with a <ref> tag before them and a </ref> tag after the text of the footnote. At the bottom of the letter put <references /> and when viewed the footnotes will appear there.

If you forget to include <references/> at the end of the article, none of the footnotes will appear.

This page itself uses footnotes, such as the one at the end of this sentence.^[1] If you view the source of this page by clicking "Edit this page", you can see a working example of footnotes.

Example

According to scientists, the Sun is pretty big.<ref>E. Miller, The Sun, (New York: Academic Press, 2005), 23-5.</ref>
The Moon, however, is not so big.<ref>R. Smith, "Size of the Moon", Scientific American, 46 (April 1978): 44-6.</ref>

==Notes==
<references/>

Text basics

For more advanced text editing see this page: [1]

List basics

MediaWiki offers three types of lists. Ordered lists, unordered lists, and definition lists. In the following sections, ordered lists are used for examples. Unordered lists would give corresponding results.

* Lists are easy to do:
** start every line
* with a star
** more stars mean
*** deeper levels

*A newline
*in a list  
marks the end of the list.
Of course
*you can
*start again.

# Numbered lists are good
## very organized
## easy to follow

* You can also
**break lines
**like this

; Definition lists
; item : definition
; semicolon plus term
: colon plus definition

* Or create mixed lists
*# and nest them
*#* like this
*#*; definitions
*#*: work:
*#*; apple
*#*; banana
*#*: fruits

Tables

Tables may be authored in wiki pages using either HTML table elements directly, or using wikicode formatting to define the table. HTML table elements and their use are well described on various web pages and will not be discussed here. The benefit of wikicode is that the table is constructed of character symbols which tend to make it easier to perceive the table structure in the article editing view compared to HTML table elements.

A good general rule of thumb is to avoid using a table unless you need to. Table markup often complicates page editing.

Wiki table markup summary

• The above marks must start on a new line except the double || and !! for optionally adding consecutive cells to a line.
• XHTML attributes. Each mark, except table end, optionally accepts one or more XHTML attributes. Attributes must be on the same line as the mark. Separate attributes from each other with a single space.
  • Cells and caption (| or ||, ! or !!, and |+) hold content. So separate any attributes from content with a single pipe (|). Cell content may follow on same line or on following lines.
  • Table and row marks ({| and |-) do not directly hold content. Do not add pipe (|) after their optional attributes. If you erroneously add a pipe after attributes for the table mark or row mark the parser will delete it and your final attribute if it was touching the erroneous pipe!
• Content may (a) follow its cell mark on the same line after any optional XHTML attributes or (b) on lines below the cell mark. Content that uses wiki markup that itself needs to start on a new line, such as lists, headers, or nested tables, must of course be on its own new line.

Simple table

Plain

The following table lacks borders and good spacing but shows the simplest wiki markup table structure

{|
|Orange
|Apple
|-
|Bread
|Pie
|-
|Butter
|Ice cream 
|}

Alternative

For more table-ish looking wiki markup cells can be listed on one line separated by ||. This does not scale well for longer cell content such as paragraphs. It works well for short bits of content however, such as our example table.

Extra spaces within cells in the wiki markup can be added, as I have done in the wiki markup below, to make the wiki markup itself look better but they do not affect the actual table rendering.

{|
|  Orange    ||   Apple   ||   more
|-
|   Bread    ||   Pie     ||   more
|-
|   Butter   || Ice cream ||  and more
|}

Notes

1. ↑ This footnote is an example .