Help:Editing

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Below is a selected set of tips that will get you started editing any wiki that's powered by the MediaWiki software. Basic tips are followed by § Advanced tricks that we've used on the wiki. For additional reading, see § Further help which directs to pages on Wikimedia Foundation's sites (the developer of MediaWiki). Their general Help pages are available in Italian, Russian and many other languages. That is where you'll find the most detailed and up-to-date info on editing a MediaWiki wiki.

Text formatting

Common formatting

The most common way to emphasize or set apart some text in a line is to use apostrophes to create italicized and bold text:
''Using two'' will give you italics.
'''Using three''' will give you bold.

Underlining text is not as convenient; it requires you to fall back to raw HTML markup:
<u>Here's the underline tag</u> gives you Here's the underline tag.

Monospace and unformatted text

This line actually starts with a " " character. It is rendered in a box, with a fixed-size font.

Do this for several lines to set apart a whole block of text (e.g., programming code).

The previous line is only empty in the rendered box; if you edit this page, you'll see the " " character in the wiki markup.

You can still put text in italics, bold, or bold italics.
However, leading "*", "#", ":" and ";" won't work :
*bla
#bla
;bla
:bla

For regular indentation (like this line), you should start the line with ":" as shown below.

There are several other options, the <pre>, <tt>, <code>, and <nowiki> tags, which will not be discussed in-depth here, but play around with them to see how they behave slightly differently from each other.

Line formatting

Everyone likes lists. Below are four methods for listing items.

Normal newlines
A quirk of wiki markup is that two consecutive lines will be displayed as one line. In other words, a single newline is ignored. This actually goes back to the fact that wiki markup is based on HTML, which behaves the same way. Instead of hitting Return once to start a new line, you need to hit it twice. Alternately, you can force a linebreak at any time with the <br /> tag.

Numbered lists

1. This line actually begins with a "#" character.
   1. This line actually begins with two "#" characters.
   2. So does this one.
2. Here's the next single-"#" line.

Bulleted lists

• This line actually begins with a "*" character.
  • This line begins with two "*" characters.

Indented paragraphs

This line begins with a ":" character. The whole paragraph will wrap around using this indentation.

When starting a second indented line, you don't need to put an extra newline after the previous line like you normally would.

The more ":"s you put at the start of the line, the more indentation you get.

Titled paragraphs

This line starts with a ";"

Starting the next line with a ":" creates the impression of a paragraph under a title, useful for typesetting word definitions, dialogue lines, etc.

Links

Basically, there are thee types of links: (1) links to external pages and files, (2) intrawiki links to other pages on the wiki, and (3) interwiki links.

External links

(1a) Write the following to get some text acting as an outgoing hyperlink.

[http://oni.bungie.org/forum/ here is our forum]

The result is: here is our forum

(1b) If you omit the label text, the result will be different:

Here [http://oni.bungie.org/forum/] is our forum

The result is: here [1] is our forum. However, this is not part of our usual style on this wiki. You should always label your links.

(1c) You can also write URLs without any markup. Like this:

Here is our forum: http://oni.bungie.org/forum/

Note that external images will appear inline if you use their bare URL like this.

Intrawiki links

(2a) Write the following to get an intrawiki link to one of our own pages:

[[Quotes/Consoles#STURMANDERUNG_:_Final_Stage]]

The result is this: Quotes/Consoles#STURMANDERUNG_:_Final_Stage

(2b) Write following to get an intrawiki link which is labeled with some text:

[[OniSplit#Download_links|You can download OniSplit here]]

The result is this: You can download OniSplit here

This kind of link (2a/2b) spares you from writing http://wiki.oni2.net/OniSplit#Download_links

Anchor template

If you want to link to something that isn't a section, use the {{Template:Anchor}}.

{{Anchor|your_anchor}}

With this you can get an ordinary "page#your_anchor" URL.

Preview content on link hover

For this to work you need some unformatted or simple formatted text before the first section (==section==). Previewing of images is possible but not documented. (See chapter previews.)

Similarly, you can use the H template to show some shortened custom text.

[[link|{{H|hover text|normal text}}]]

Interwiki links

You can link to pages on Wiktionary, the English Wikipedia and Meta-Wiki as if they were pages of our own wiki, using the shortcuts wiktionary:, wikipedia: and metawikimedia:. When you make an interwiki link, the outbound link icon changes from an upward arrow to a sideward arrow to show that you are linking to a fellow wiki, not some random web site.

An example of using an interwiki prefix would be [[wikipedia:Test]], which produces wikipedia:Test (you can supply alternate text using the syntax [[wikipedia:Test|Test]] to get rid of that pesky prefix in the final markup: Test). These prefixes accept language codes, so you could use the markup [[wikipedia:de:Test|Test]] to link to the German article Test (the URL will appear wrong, but Wikipedia knows what it means).

All of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects have prefixes available for linking to them. Also note that we have handy shortcuts for the two most-used prefixes; wikipedia: can be shortened to wp: and wiktionary: can be shortened to wikt:. The complete list of currently supported interwiki links can be obtained by clicking here.

Looking at the list, you'll see that some prefixes are not actually for other wikis, but general web shortcuts; google: produces a Google search query for the provided search term, and cache: produces a Google page cache query for the provided URL.

Images and categories

To place an image, you type its name inside of double brackets, preceded by "Image:", e.g. [[Image:TXMPPOSTER3.png]]. This markup will be replaced by the named image. If you only want to link to the page of an image, you type [[:Image:TXMPPOSTER3.png]] to get Image:TXMPPOSTER3.png.

Categories work the same way. Every page on the wiki should be placed into at least one category using this kind of markup at the end of the page: [[Category:Policies and documentation]]. This will cause the name of the category to appear at the bottom of the page. However, if you only want to link to a category page, not place the current page into that category, you use the same technique as linking to an image page: [[:Category:Policies and documentation]] gives you Category:Policies and documentation. To see what categories are available, you can look at the Site Map.

Templates and transclusion

Text can be "transcluded" from one place on the wiki to another using {{this markup}}. Transclusion means that whenever the original text is updated, so is the text inserted in place of the page link enclosed in double-braces. Transclusion is most commonly used in order to place templates on a page. Here's a list of templates. Pick one, and then click on "What links here" once you're on the template page. You should see a list of pages, each one probably followed by "(transclusion)". Look at the wiki code for those pages to see how the template's text or markup was placed into the page.

Templates are not a special kind of wiki page; they're simply a term that we use to refer to pages that are meant to be transcluded. Templates usually provide a standardized format for something like a table, or else they supply a standard header or footer. You should familiarize yourself with the templates if you plan to do a decent amount of editing; they are not only time-savers, they also help editors make their edits fit in with OniGalore standards, and make it easier to change large amounts of wiki text at once.

Tables

MediaWiki provides simple markup for creating HTML tables that avoids the need to create lots of <tr> and <td> tags, though the results are also somewhat more limited than a pure HTML table. To open a table simply write {|, optionally declare column names with !, then declare new rows with |- and new cells within a row with |. This markup…

 {|
 !Column 1
 !Column 2
 |-
 |R1C1
 |R1C2
 |-
 |R2C1
 |R2C2
 |}

…produces this table:

Column 1	Column 2
R1C1	R1C2
R2C1	R2C2

Normally we apply the class "wikitable" to a table to give it borders and make it look pretty with {| class="wikitable", though you can do a lot of manual styling for almost any custom look you want (see § Further help to read more about tables).

To make the table a fixed width, add this CSS styling to the first line: {| style="width:500px;". You can also use a percentage such as width:50%;. To center the table on the page, use {| style="margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;".

For more advanced table markup, see below.

Advanced tricks

Some of these "tricks" are very simple in practice, but hard to remember. This is basically a list of bookmarks to helpful examples around the wiki:

• Alphabetic footnotes: Quotes/Manual
• Indenting wrapped text: Walkthrough
• Justified text: Oni2:Aftermath
• Math extension usage: OBD:SNDD, XML:OBAN
• Multicolumn text: User:Iritscen
• Retitling a page: Template:Retitle
• Separating footnotes and citations on an article: Oni
• Tables:
  • Advanced styling: Template:OBD File Header
  • Aesthetic designs: Template:PoliciesSidebox, Anniversary Edition
  • Hideable columns: OBD:Versions
  • Multipart tables: Rights
  • Multirow sortable groups: Videos § Full playthroughs
  • Sortable columns: Oni 2 (Angel Studios)/Levels

Further help

Here's some more comprehensive help, straight from the source.

Reading

Go | Search | URL | Namespace | Page name | Section | Backlinks

Link | Piped link | Interwiki link | Redirect | Category | Image page

Logging in and preferences

Logging in | Preferences | User style

Editing

Advanced editing | Editing FAQ | Edit toolbar | Export | Import | Shortcuts

Tracking changes

Recent changes (enhanced) | Related changes | Watching pages | Diff

Page history | Edit summary | User contributions | Minor edit | Patrolled edit

Style & formatting

Wikitext examples | Reference card | HTML in wikitext | List | Table | Sorting | Colors

Special input and output

InputBox | Special characters | Displaying a formula | Images (uploads) | EasyTimeline

Advanced functioning

Template | Advanced templates | Parameter default | Magic word

ParserFunctions | Substitution | Array | Calculation | System message

Page management

Starting a new page | Renaming (moving) a page | Protecting pages | Deleting a page

Special pages

Talk pages