Help:Editing

A few words from the masters

Be sure to follow our seven-point plan to editing nirvana HERE, and you'll become a fine contributor to the wiki in no time at all. Iritscen, hapécat-in-chief Don't listen to that guy. geyser, syndicate accessory

Editing OniGalore

We won't be giving a detailed course on MediaWiki markup here; just a few basic "how to"s, "do"s and "don't"s that will mostly get you by, when it comes to our wiki. For more details, see the section Further Help below.

Wikimedia's general Help is also available in Italian and Russian, as well as Greek and French and Slovenian. That is where you'll find the most up-to-date info on the MediaWiki software.

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Links

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

External links

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

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

The result is: here is our forum

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

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

The result is: here [1] is our forum

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

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

Note that images will appear inline if you do that.

Intralinks

(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 fixed to some text

[[OniSplit#Download_links|here you can download onisplit]]

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

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 prefixes [[wiktionary:]], [[wikipedia:]] and [[metawikipedia:]].

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Recommendations

Although we're not as formal as Wikipedia, here are a few things that do matter to us on OniGalore.

Signature

You should sign your post whenever you edit a page that is discussion-oriented -- that is, a talk page or a project page, as opposed to a formal article like Konoko. You sign posts by inserting three or four tildes ("~") after your added text. A triple tilde will just give us your name and a link to your user page. It's better to use four tildes, which will also add a time stamp to your signature.

Three tildes ("~~~") produces

geyser

But using the "four-tilde" button in the toolbar produces the standard Wikipedia signature style

--Iritscen 05:11, 11 June 2011 (CEST)

Having the time and date on your post makes discussions easier to follow, so please make it a habit to use the signature button.

Preview

Use the "Show preview" button as much as possible before submitting. Sure, even experienced and careful users have to make corrective edits sometimes, but newcomers to wikis are known for making numerous edits to a page in order to fix their mistakes. One reason this happens is that they do not make full use of the preview feature.

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 timesavers, they also help editors make their edits fit in with OniGalore standards.

Categories

Categories are a special kind of wiki page. You can browse the page that explains the plan behind the categories HERE, or the actual categorized pages HERE. When making a new page (or uploading a file, which creates a file page), you should endeavor to apply the correct category to it by placing [[Category:Category name]] at the very bottom of the page's text. If you aren't sure, you can simply leave the page uncategorized and someone else will categorize it later.

Uploaded files

Images uploaded to the wiki cannot be grouped in folders smartly, as on your own computer, so keep in mind that proper naming and categorization are the only ways to tell, from a distance, what on earth your file is.

Therefore, please give your images the most explicit, unique, unambiguous name you can think of.

Like

GUIDO Hikari closeup.jpg

NOT like

Real000.png

Please also place some kind of description in the Summary field if the file is not totally self-explanatory. The category markup, [[Category:Category name]], goes in the Summary field of the Upload File screen, below any description you may have supplied.

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Various tips

Line formatting

Everyone likes lists. Below are four methods for listing items, but there are also buttons available in the toolbar that make it faster to create these lists than typing the markup by hand. See the documentation for XEB to learn about the toolbar buttons.

Numbered lists

1. This line actually begins with a "#" character
   1. This line actually begins with two "#" characters
      1. This line actually begins with three "#" characters
      2. This line actually begins with three "#" characters
   2. This line actually begins with two "#" characters
2. This line actually begins with a "#" character

Bulleted lists

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

Indented paragraphs

This line actually begins with a ":" character. The whole paragraph will wrap around indented; it all has to be on the same line, though.

To start a new paragraph indented the same way, just start another line with a ":"
You can also use the <br> tag to start a new line.

Put "::" at the start of the line to indent more.

Put ":::" at the start of the line to indent even more.

(actually, it's a lot like tabulation)

Definitions (titled paragraphs)

This line starts with a ";"

This one too, but

it switched to indented text when it encountered a ":" (have a look at the markup).

This allows one to typeset definitions, dialogue lines etc rather easily. You can also use it as a quick way to put a line in bold.

• the advantage of the leading ";" is that you don't have to bother about the extra new line before the bold-faced line
• the drawback is that the line can't contain a ":" unless you escape it (e.g. with the <nowiki> tag).

Like this : ":"

"Definitions" can occur within an already indented paragraph :

bla

bla

BLA

bla

bla

bla

Custom indentation only works flawlessly when you use nothing but ":"; the ";" is a bit limited.

Unformatted ASCII

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; in the markup, there's a " " character.
    This one begins with 5 leading spaces in the markup; only 4 are there when rendered.
You can still put text in italics, bold, or bold italics.
However, leading "*", "#", ":" and ";" won't work :
*bla
#bla
;bla
:bla

Bottom line : be careful when you use leading spaces in your text : is that really what you want?

For regular indentation (like this line), prefer ":".

Further Help

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

Reading

Go | Search | Stop words | 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 | Parser function | ParserFunctions | Parameter default

Variable | Magic word | System message | Substitution | Array | Calculation

Page management

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

Special pages

Talk page | Testing | Sandbox