Help:Editing 101

From BigSoccer Wiki

How to edit an article

You can edit an article simply by clicking on the "Edit" tab and editing the source code.

The "Show preview" button allows you to check the appearance of the page before submitting your changes. The "Edit summary" field is for a brief description of your edit. This is important as a means of identifying various versions of a page.

Logged-in users can check "This is a minor edit" to indicate that they've made no significant changes (this generally means that no changes have been made other than punctuation and/or spelling). Logged-in users may also add the page to their watchlist.

"Save page" results in the changes taking effect immediately.

Character formatting

Text will be bold if it is preceeded by three apostrophes (''') and followed by three apostrophes.

Text will be italicised if it is preceeded by two apostrophes ('') and followed by two apostrophes.

Text will be in bold italics if it is preceeded by five apostrophes (''''') and followed by five apostrophes.

Section headers

An article may be divided into sections by starting each section with a header. A header is created by placing the title of the section between equal signs (=). The highest level headers should be a level two headers which begin with two equal signs and end with two equal signs. A level three header begins and ends with three equal signs.

If an article contains more than three sections, a table of contents will appear on the page (unless TOC display is disabled).

Paragraphs

A new paragraph is created by leaving a blank line in the source.

A forced line break can be achieved with the <br> tag.

Indented text is created by starting a line with a colon (:).

Lists

With a simple syntax, wikitext supports unordered lists (bulleted), numbered lists and definition list. Lists of different kinds may be nested. A new line marks the end of a list.

Unordered (bulleted) lists
A line that begins with an asterisk (*) is displayed as a list item (indented and bulleted). More asterisks indicate deeper nesting. An asterisk followed by a colon (*:) continues the previous list item.

Numbered lists
A numbered list is achieved by beginning each line with a number sign (#). Numbering stops at any line that begins with a colon (indented text) or an asterisk (bulleted text).

Definition lists
To make a definition, begin a line a semicolon (;), followed by the definition term, followed by a colon (:) and the definition.

Preformatted text

Beginning each line with a leading space will prevent lines from being reformatted. New lines and multiple spaces will be preserved. The software will still interpret Wiki markup.

column    column
  one       two
   10        10
   20       100
   30      1000

column    column
  one       two
   10        10
   20       100
   30      1000

Enclosing text in HTML <pre> and </pre> tags will also prevent lines from being reformatted and will also disable the interpretation of wiki markup.

Disabling wiki markup

Enclosing text in <nowiki> and </nowiki> tags will disable the interpretation of wiki markup (as well as HTML). The software will still reformat text by removing new lines and multiple spaces.

Inserting a comment

A comment enclosed in HTML comment tags (<!-- and -->) will not appear in the output at all.

Links

Wiki markup makes creating links easy.

Wikilinks

An internal link (also called a wikilink) points to an article within BigSoccerWiki. This is the most common type of link contained in article text. It is also the easiest type of link to create.

In its simplest form, an internal link is simply the title of the target article enclosed in double brackets.

A pipe (|) can be used to make the link text different from the article title. What preceeds the pipe is the article title and what follows the pipe is the link text.

Note: Article titles are case sensitive. "Red Card" and "red card" are not the same. Note also that, because of a quirk in the wiki software, it is best if only the first letter of an article title is capatalized. Words in the title other than the first should generally not be capitalized. This makes it easier to create a wikilink without having to use a pipe (see the help page: How to create a new article).

A special feature of wikilinks is that the software checks to see if target pages exist before displaying an article. If the target of a wikilink does not exist, the link appears in red.

Section linking

A link in the form [[#anchor_name]] will link to a section named "anchor name" (or to an anchor created using the HTML code <span id="anchor_name"></span>.) A section or anchor link can be appended to any type of link.

External links

An external link can be made in several ways.

Wiki software will interpret a url as a link.

Placing single brackets around a url results in a link that appears as a number enclosed in brackets.

Placing brackets around a url followed by a space and some link text results in the link appearing as the link text (don't omit the space!).

Interwiki links

An interwiki link is a special type of link, similar in form to a wikilink (enclosed in double brackets), but containing a prefix (separated by a colon (:)) that specifies a target namespace.

As is the case with wikilinks, a pipe (|) can be used in an interwiki link to alter the link (see above).

External links

• Wikipedia help page on editing