Syntax tutorial
From Mount Wiki
Formatting Wikipedia articles is a bit different from writing on a standard word processor. Instead of a strict 'what you see is what you get approach', Mount Wiki uses text codes to create particular elements of the page (e.g. headings). This "language" is known as Wikitext (or Wiki-markup) and is designed for ease of editing.
Contents |
[edit] Bold and italics
The most commonly used wiki tags are bold and italics. Bolding and italicizing are done by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes ('):
| You type | You get |
| ''italic'' | italic |
|
'''bold''' |
bold |
|
'''''bold italic''''' |
bold italic |
On Mount Wiki, the names of an article's subject are written in bold when they are first mentioned in the article. For example, the article Rimpfischhorn begins:
- The Rimpfischhorn (4,199 m) is a mountain in the Pennine Alps of Switzerland.
Italics may be used for the names of books, movies, albums, and computer/video game titles. If the first mention of the subject of an article is also a book or movie title then bold italics is used.
[edit] 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 the article by inserting a heading for each section.
Headings can be created like this:
| You type | You get |
|
== Heading == |
[edit] Heading |
|
=== Subheading === |
[edit] Subheading |
If an article has at least four headings, a table of contents will automatically be generated. You can try this out on your own userpage.
[edit] Linking
[edit] HTML
HTML code can be used in pages to produce more advanced formatting such as colors, tables, and edit page layout. However, you do not need to know HTML to use Wikipedia and follow formatting conventions.
Linking articles together is very important. These easily created links allow users to access information related to the article they are reading and greatly add to Mount Wiki's utility.
[edit] When to link
The easiest way to learn when to link is to look at Wikipedia articles for examples. If you are trying to decide whether to make a link or not, ask yourself "If I were reading this article, would the link be useful to me?" Usually link the first, and only the first, occurrence of a word/term in the article, that does not have an implicitly understood definition.
[edit] How to link
When you want to make a link to another page (called a wiki link) you have to put it in double square brackets, like this:
- [[Sandbox]] = Sandbox
If you want the display text of the link to have a different title, you can do so by adding the pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and other keyboards) followed by the alternative name. For example:
- [[Target page|display text]] = display text
You can make a link to a specific section of a page like so:
- [[Target page#Target section|display text]] = display text
If you want the display text of the link to appear in italics or bold, nest the double square brackets for the link within the multiple apostrophes that delimit the italicized or bold text, like this:
- ''[[War and Peace]]'' = War and Peace
[edit] Using images
Images uploaded to Mount Wiki are automatically placed into the image namespace, a namespace of Mount Wiki. This means that image page names start with the prefix "File:". To incorporate your image into an article you need to use the image syntax. As an example in its simplest form:
[[File:Example.png|thumb|right|Example image caption]]
Where the image is called Example.png. Using "thumb" forces the creation of a thumbnail; replace "Example image caption" with a suitable caption.
The extendad image syntax page is available on another page that can be visited here.
[edit] Categories
You can also put the article in a category with others in a related topic. Just type [[Category:]], and put the name of the category between the colon and the brackets.
It is very important to put in the correct categories so that other people can easily find your work. The best way to find which categories to put in is to look at pages on similar subjects, and check which categories they use. For example if you write an article about a type of tree, you may look at an article on another type of tree to see which categories could be appropriate.
