Editing Cheat Sheet

by Spychotic

Hello all!

As an amateur Wikipedia editor, I know one or two things about editing these articles. Not much, but enough to help you all get started yourself.

The first thing to remember about this project is that it is COLLABORATIVE, you know the 'right' answers to any format/content questions as much as I do!

So, make good use of the 'Discussion' pages at the top of the sheet for suggesting modifications you'd like to see. If one or two other people think it's a good idea, then do it!

Don't ask for permission to make corrections though, just do it!

Don't ask for permission to start a sub-project (like plot walkthroughs), just do it! (though please publicise the fact so that potential helpers can find the page!)

Now, on to how to do all of this... Lets say we want to start a page or a small project (like a collection of walkthroughs), but we want to check to make sure that at least someone thinks that it is a good idea and might help us, because we don't want to have to do it all on our own.

First, we'll need to go to a discussion page, and ask someone. For projects, the main page is probably the place to go. For a page jumping off from another, for example, adding in the ships from one of the mods out there, you'll probably want the 'Ship list' discussion page. Use your noggin, it should be obvious what the right way to go about it is! Let's get started then...

Discussion page

On the Discussion page, it's nice to know who you're talking to and who is talking to you. Wiki makes this easy with signing, so, for example, if I want you to know who I am, I sign my work Spychotic If I want a timestamp on it too, I can do that; Spychotic 16:53, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

This is accomplished using three and four tildes (~) respectively, like this;

~~~ for plain signature, ~~~~ for timestamped signature

Also, it'd be nice if you demarcated your missives; use hyphens for this, you'll need four of them to do one of these; It looks like this in the editing page;

----

Now, once someone has told us it's a good idea and they'll help out, it's time to create your page...

Indentation

Particularly useful for talk pages is indentation markup. It behaves a lot like the bulleted lists as they may be chained together. unlike the bulleted lists you can pretty much drop as deep as you like without odd appearing bullet points.

Indentation markup is just a colon. ":" please note that to use it, it must be flush against the left side of the editing window like many of the reserved markup characters. As a space is usually interpreted as a code/pre markup.

Links

To create a link, for example, to Argon Prime, you use double square brackets; two preceding the word and two succeeding it. So, the 'Argon Prime' link looks like this in the 'Edit' box;

[[Argon Prime]]

This will search through the database for an article named 'Argon Prime', and if it exists, the link will appear blue. If it does not exist, the link will be red, and clicking on it will direct you to begin a page with that title. Of course, this means that you need to put the page title in the link exactly. So, what if you want to make a link to Argon Prime by referring to it as the Argon home sector in your text? You use the | key like this, with the actual page title, |, then the text that you want to make up the link; [[Argon Prime|the Argon home sector]] Easy!

Generally accepted linking behavior is to link the first occurrence of the link text.

To link external sites use one square bracket and the {{linky}} template like so: [{{linky}}meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Link]. This will show up as a number in brackets; [1]. To have text appear in place of the raw link, add your text after a space like so:[{{linky}}meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Link wikimedia link help].

It now looks like this; wikimedia link help. You can refer to it for more information on linking.

Nowiki tags

You may have noticed a number of examples. These are often accomplished by using a <nowiki> tag. nowiki tags turn off wiki processing for the encapsulated text. this can be seen more clearly if you attempt to edit this page.

for more information wikimedia nowiki help check the section on Disabling wikitext interpretation and/or reformatting, anchoring unfortunately does not work particularly well for external links.

Headings

So, now that you've linked to a page, you'll probably want to format it properly. This involves grouping things under headings, like the one two lines above what you're reading now. How do you do this? Well, headings, subheadings and subn headings are made using equals (=) signs;

==Heading 1==

===Subheading 1.1===

===Subheading 1.2===

==Heading 2==

==Heading 3==

etc.

A note here on what to put in your article. If you're starting a new project, then you've got free rein. But if you're contributing to an existing project, for example the ship list, please take a peek at the other articles and make some effort to format them in roughly the same way. Check that project's Discussion page; you might find that a note has been put in there on standard formatting.

Is the current standard missing something you think should be there? Tell us! Go to the Discussion page and post!

Another advantage of headings is that they create name anchors which permits you to direct links to that specific section. for example: Editing Cheat Sheet#Headings. these links may be created by adding the header label after a hash/pound sign. like:[[Editing Cheat Sheet#Headings]]

Page vs Section Editing

Sections can be individually be edited, this is great if you just want to do a small change in one area.
If you're doing a change across multiple sections you may be better served to do a page edit through the tab at the top of the page. this will let you access and change all the sections and even stuff not presaged by a header.

Previews

You may want to preview your changes before saving, it'll save you from having to do another edit if you miskeyed or didn't quite get your edit right. Previews are also great if you're creating a new structure since you can drop your new object into an existing page, preview it and then just click the red link to create it.

Getting more help

The full Wikipedia mark-up list can be found here Spychotic 04:55, 6 October 2010 (CDT)

further information can be gathered on the wikimedia help sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Help

for instance links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents/Links

and can be generally googled as wiki help:(whatever) for example: wiki help:Dynamic Page List

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=wiki+help:Dynamic+Page+List&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Madned 19:08, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

there is additional information on this wiki's help page at Help:Contents