User:Quacks/Testing
Basic Editing
Creating new pages
A quick and easy explanation on how to create new pages. For making stuff such as guides or whatever your project is!
Alright, you need to create a page for a personal project, a guide to write or do whatever with. To do this follow the quick and easy steps listed below!
- Step 1: Type the name of the page you want to create into the search bar on the top right and hit enter.
- Step 2: You will now see the results of your search. Depending on what you typed into the search bar you might get some results from different pages that have words that match your search but that is not important. To create the page click on the red bit of text. (See Figure 1)
Figure 1 - Step 3: After you clicked on the red bit of text it will have re-directed you to an empty page with the name you typed into the search bar. In here you are free to create, type or put whatever and use it how you see fit.
- Step 4: Saving your changes is done by pressing the blue save page button at the bottom of the text editor. If you want to detail some of the changes you have done or what kind of page you have created you can give a short little summary in the text box beneath Summary: in the editor. Anything you put in there will be shown in the change log.
Miscellaneous Notes:
- Try and keep your page names short and to the point and do not make them overly long. (This will only result in a mess when you try to link or display the name of a page with a really long name)
- Always capitalize the first letter of a page name.
Editing a page
A detailed explanation on how to edit pages with the two different editors.
Disclaimer: This section will mostly cover the Source editor (Text editor) For help with the visual editor see: Mediawiki's guide
So you need to edit a page for some reason? It might be out of date, you might have found a spelling error or other incorrect information. Whatever it is that warrants the need for a change this quick step by step guide will help in getting your footing with editing a page on the wiki.
- Step 1: Navigate to the page you want to edit and click Edit source or Edit (See Figure 2)
(Clicking Edit source will bring up the text editor while Edit brings up the visual editor)
- Step 2 (Edit - Source/Text editor): You will now have the text editor open and be confronted with a window that looks like the following: (See Figure 3)
- Step 2.1: Editor explanation (Source/text editor): See figure 3 and the text explanation below here.
(1) In the middle of the screen and highlighted with red (1) is a large text box. This is the actual contents of the page (In text form), anything changed or added there will show up when the page is edited.
(2) Beneath that, and highlighted with green (2) is the summary box. This small text box can be used to describe any changes you made. When you save your edit and you described your changes in the summary box, that small summary will be shown in the change log in: Recent changes as well as the change log of the actual page itself. The button to view the change log of any page is located right next to the Edit and Edit Source buttons on the top right side of any page.
(3) Underneath the Summary box you can find two little buttons highlighted with purple (3). You can either tick or un-tick these and nothing else. Ticking the This is a minor edit box will mark the edit you made as minor. You can do this if the changes you made did not affect the contents of the page too much or if it was a simple small edit. (Edits smaller than 500 bytes will automatically be marked as minor) The button next to that will simply decide if the page will be added to your Watchlist when you save the edit.
(4) Highlighted with Orange (4) and at the bottom of the editor four buttons can be found. All of which will be explained in their listed order:
- Save changes: Simply saves the edits and changes you made to the page, updating it to the newly revised version you made.
- Show preview: Will show you a preview of the edit you are currently working on. Remove some words from (1) and add a few in another and hitting show preview afterward will show you the changes you made in the normal way the page is always displayed.
- Show changes: Shows a comparison and differences between the last revision of the page and the current edit you are working on. This difference is shown in a simple text format with things that have been removed highlighted in yellow, and new additions shown with blue.
- Cancel: Simply cancels your edit and closes the Editor.
(5) And lastly at the very top of the editor, highlighted with blue (5) is a helpful hot bar. This hot bar has buttons for: Adding bold text, Italic text, images, links and a whole lot more advanced and special functions listed underneath the drop-down menus for Advanced and Special characters. If you ever feel lost or forgot how to do something basic like linking to stuff on the wiki the drop-down menu underneath Help provides some great explanation to some of the more basic functions of the wiki.
- Step 2 (Edit - Visual editor): After clicking Edit you will be re-directed to the visual editor. The visual editor is an amazing and a very powerful tool. Its main strength comes from the fact that you can preview your edit as you're working on it. Given its nature is that you edit the text as its shown on the page, instead of working within a text-box like the source editor has.
- Step 2.1: Editor explanation (Visual editor): Mediawiki does a much better job at explaining the visual editor than I ever could so for a guide and explanation to it see: Help:VisualEditor/User guide