Help:Editing

Absolute beginners?

If you can type and click, you can edit most pages on this wiki.

1. Find a page to improve. (If you want, you can practice in the Sandbox first. It's there for "practicing", or experimenting with almost anything. It's a good place to get used to how the wiki works.)
2. Click "Edit this page".
3. An "edit box" will open - type your new sentences or corrections (just like MS or Lotus or WordPerfect wordprocessing)
4. Click the "Save" button - (well, it may be wise to hit the "Preview" button first, in case of mistakes!)
5. You're now an editor. Welcome to the team!

More detail

As with all wikis, you can edit any non-protected page on this wiki. Your changes will be visible immediately. Just click the "edit" link that appears near the top of every page.

Explain your edit in the "Summary" box between the edit window and the save and preview buttons. eg: "typo" or "added info on xyz".

Use the "Show preview" button to check your edit and get the formatting right before saving. Remember to Save page before moving on.

If you are logged in, you can mark an edit as minor by checking the This is a minor edit box to let people know your edit is not something substantive.

To try editing, open a new window and go to the Sandbox (which is an editing test area), and then click the "edit" link. Add something and click save.

Formatting

Most text formatting is usually done with wiki markup, so you don't have to learn HTML.

Bold and italics

Bold and italics are added by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes ('):

• ''italics'' is rendered as italics. (2 apostrophes on each side)
• '''bold''' is rendered as bold. (3 apostrophes on each side)
• '''''bolded italics''''' is rendered as bolded italics. (2 + 3 = 5 apostrophes on each side)

Headings and subheadings

Headings and subheadings are an easy way to improve the organization of an article. If you can see two or more distinct topics being discussed, you can break up your article by inserting a heading for each section.

Headings can be created like this:

• ==Main heading== (2 equals signs)
• ===Subheading=== (3 equals signs)
• ====Another level down==== (4 equals signs)
• =====Another level down===== (5 equals signs)

If an article has at least three headings, a table of contents (TOC) will be automatically generated. Try creating some headings in the Sandbox and see the effect on the TOC.

Indenting

To indent text, place a colon (:) right at the beginning of a line. The more colons you put, the further indented the text will be. A newline (pressing Enter or Return) marks the end of the indented paragraph.

For example:
This is aligned all the way to the left.

:This is indented slightly.

::This is indented more.

is shown as:
This is aligned all the way to the left.

This is indented slightly.

This is indented more.

Bullet points

To insert a bullet, use an asterisk (*). Similar to rectal indentation, more asterisks in front of a paragraph means more indentation.

A brief example:

*First list item

*Second list item

**Sub-list item under second

*Isn't this fun?

Which is shown as:

• First list item
• Second list item
  • Sub-list item under second
• Isn't this fun?

Numbered lists

You can also create numbered lists. For this, use the number sign or hash symbol (#). Using more #s will affect the level of indenting.

Example:

#First item

#Second item

##Sub-item under second item

#Third item

Shows up as:

1. First item
2. Second item
   1. Sub-item under second item
3. Third item

Links

Links are important on wikis to help readers navigate your site.

Internal links

You can extensively cross-reference wiki pages using internal links. You can add links to existing titles, and also to titles you think ought to exist in future.

To make a link to another page on the same wiki, just put the title in double square brackets.

For example, if you want to make a link to, say, the Main Page, it would be:

[[Main Page]]

If you want to use words other than the article title as the text of the link, you can add an alternative name by adding it after a pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and other keyboards).

For example, if you wanted to make a link to the Main Page, but wanted it to say "home page" you would write it as such:

View the [[Main Page|home page]]...

It would appear as:

View the home page...

When you want to use the plural of an article title (or add any other suffix) for your link, you can add the extra letters directly outside the double square brackets.

For example, you would write:

Add questions for [[quiz]]zes.

It would appear as:

Add questions for quizzes. (the link will be red if this page does not yet exist)

Interwiki links

To link to another wiki, you can use its title followed by a colon and the article name, instead of using the full URL. See Special:Interwiki for more details.

External links

If you want to link to a site outside of ShoutWiki, you may just type the full URL for the page you want to link to.

http://www.google.com/

It is often more useful to make the link display something other than the URL, so use one square bracket at each end, with the alternative title after the full URL address, separated by a space (not a pipe). So if you want the link to appear as Google search engine, just type:

[http://www.google.com/ Google search engine]

Redirects

To redirect automatically from one page to another, type #REDIRECT and then put in brackets the name of the page to be redirected to.

For example, you could redirect from "Cats" to "Cat". That way, anyone typing either version in the search box will automatically go to "Cat".

Wiki variables and templates

Use {{SITENAME}} to see the current wiki. For instance, {{SITENAME}} on this site prints out as Star Wars Merchandise Wiki.

That and a few other templates are common to MediaWiki sites.

Check the current list of all templates on this wiki.

You can create templates. After you create the page Template:XXX, using the command {{XXX}} will include that content in your current page. So, if you have something that needs to be included on many other pages, you might want to use a template.