Class One
Class One: Basic formatting.
Welcome. "Wiki" is a Hawaiian word meaning "quick," because it is designed to be quickly and easily changed. Thus, wiki software is a way to run a website so that more than one person can quickly and easily edit the contents. This is most famously done at Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit," but as you can already see, the wiki format is one of the best ways to assemble information on any subject. If you see a typo, a gap in the story, or even a whole missing subject, you can dive right in and provide that missing or wrong information. Unfortunately, there is a specialized sort of language used on a wiki, and so you do have to learn just a little bit. But I think you will find that after a sharp little curve, it's easy to do most common tasks. In this course, we will bring you up to speed so that you can do the 95% of all the things you might ever want to do on TalossaWiki.
Text
On almost every page on the wiki, you'll see that there are several tabs along the top. Go to this page. You'll see that there are two tabs in the upper-left: "User Page" and "Discussion." "User Page" refers to the actual page you're looking at - the main body of the article. It won't always say "User Page:" sometimes it willl say "Citizen" or more commonly "Main," But in all cases, if you click that link, you go to the article, and you can read about the topic (in this case, the author Vladimir Nabokov).
Every article also has a "Discussion" page. On that Nabokov page, click on "Discussion" now.
Each article's discussion page, more commonly called a "talk page," is for talking about the article's content. Sometimes it's serious talk about the information in the article, and sometimes it's just chit-chat. Here we can see a short conversation between myself and another (nonexistent) user. Later, we'll come back to it. Return to the article itself now, though, by clicking "User Page."
Back looking at information about Nabokov? Good. Look on the upper-right, at the other tabs on the page. You should see "Read," "Edit," "View History," and a little drop-down arrow. You'll notice that "Read" is selected - it looks like that little tab is at the front, because that's what you're doing: you're reading the article. But since this is a wiki, you can do more than read! You can edit!
Click "Edit." That tab will open and come to the fore, and you'll see the actual wikitext that produces what you see in "Read." It should look like this:
'''Vladimir Nabokov''' was a Russian-born author. He was most famous for his book ''Lolita.'' He was not a citizen of [[Talossa]]. In his book '''''Ada''''', however, he did write about a bold new world. So he might have like our own [[Talossa|bold experiment]].
[[Category:Instruction]]
Let's go through the formatting of this text, and figure out how it works.
First of all, you'll see that "Vladimir Nabokov" is surrounded by three apostrophes ('''). This is a bit of wikicode that tells TalossaWiki to render that text in bold. On TalossaWiki, as on most wikis, we generally put the first use of a page's topic in bold. Remember that these have to come in pairs! If you forget to put a second set of three apostrophes ('''Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian-born author) then your entire article will be in bold! The wiki can't read what you write, so it doesn't know to stop bolding things unless you tell it to stop.
The next sentence refers to the book Lolita, and surrounds it with only two apostrophes (''). As you can see on "View", that means that the resulting word is italicized. It works the same as bold, in every other way.
The fourth sentence of this article uses both italics and bold. It does this with five apostrophes ('''''Ada'''''). Normally you wouldn't bold that word, but I did it here just to show you how you can italicize something that is bold.
There are all kinds of other little bits of formatting you might find useful in an article's text, but probably the most important other one is how to make a list. It's very simple: just start a line with an asterisk. *Like this.
- Like this.
- And you can add-
- -as many points to the list as you want!
Numbered lists are just as easy; you just use a hash mark instead of an asterisk. #Like this.
- Like this.
- And then it keeps counting-
- -as you keep adding them!
Easy, right?
Internal links
Let's go back a little bit to that third sentence. You can see that the word "Talossa" is surrounded by two pairs of brackets ([[Talossa]]). This is the very essence of wikiformatting, and probably the most important thing you can learn here now. It's an internal link - it makes those words into a link. [[Talossa]] goes to Talossa. [[Chancery]] goes to Chancery. If the article exists, then the link will be blue. If it doesn't exist, it's a redlink. This will tell the reader that there's no point in clicking on the link, because there's no article there. For example, we don't have an article on Terrance the Terrible Tarantula, so that link is red.
Remember that only exactly that which is in the brackets will become a link. If you want to link to Secretary of State, you can't write [[Secretaries of State]]. And you can't use wikimarkup inside of the link, because [['''Secretary of State''']] links to '''Secretary of State''', not Secretary of State. Put the markup outside of the brackets ('''[[Secretary of State]]''').
There are a couple of ways around this problem of exactness:
- A bracket that ends partway through a word will appear like a normal link, but it will only go to that which is between the brackets. For example, [[Talossa]]ns doesn't link to the "Talossans" page, it goes to "Talossa," even though the whole word is blue: Talossans. This works for all sorts of words in plural ([[Seneschal]]s) or with demonyms ([[Florencia]]ns).
- If you want a link to go someplace completely different than the text, you can use a pipe symbol (|) in the link. The words before the pipe will be the actual target of the link, while the words after the pipe will be the displayed text. [[Chancery|hardest workers in the country]] appears like this: hardest workers in the country. This is one of the most useful tricks you can use.
The other kind of link you might need is an external link. This is a link that goes outside the wiki, to another page on the web. This sort of link is just one pair of brackets surrounding a URL. If you type [http://www.google.com/], then you get a little linking thing like this:[1]. A better way to do it, though, is to put in some display text. That's also easy to do. Just put a space after the URL, then any other words you put in there will be the display text. For example, [http://www.google.com/ this is an external link] becomes this is an external link.
So now you know how to italicize and bold things, how to make lists, and how to link to things both on and off the wiki. But that's not all that goes into making an article!