How to edit a wiki page

This site is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit almost any page. When you edit an article, you change what everyone else sees when they visit that page.

This page is a basic guide to editing a wiki pages.

See also: manual of style for formatting and style help.

How to start editing right now

Editing a Wiki page is very easy:
  • Click on the edit button at the top of a page.
  • On the edit screen, you'll see a large text field containing the content of the page you're editing. This is called the edit window. Make your edits to this text.
  • Explain the reason for your edits in the edit comment feild. (Keep it short, or use shorthand.)
  • Click the preview button to see how the edited article will look. (The edit box will be at the bottom of the preview page, so you can make changes if you don't like what you see.)
  • Click the save button to finish editing and commit your changes to the page history.

You're done. The rest of this page is just details.

Wiki software keeps track of who makes every change and where the change was made, so there's no need to specifically indicate this information within the page itself. There's no need "sign" edits you make to regular pages.

Basic wiki syntax

To add formatting to your edits (e.g. bold or italicized text), you'll need to use a special markup syntax. You can view a full set of instructions for this syntax while editing, if you click Editing help button near the bottom of the edit page.

General editing guidelines

  • while editing, everybody should place links whenever frequently used terms and keywords whenever they appear in the text. Use (( )) or the link/create page button. This is very important. If you don't link your terms and keywords your knowledge base will become a disorganized mess.

Example: AIDS, and its likely cause, HIV, are characterized by their destruction of the human immune system which can lead to severe health problems.

  • Avoid using HTML.
  • Avoid nasty language.
  • Make sure you are using the appropriate point of view, for example a neutral point of view for news summaries.
  • make a page called naming conventions for wiki pages and try to follow them.For example if all pages belonging to Some Project start with ''Some Project:" that makes it pretty easy to find them all eh?
  • Be concise.
  • Include a brief explanation of an edit you make in the Reason for edit box just below the editing box.
  • Use proper naming conventions when creating new pages. For full guidelines, see manual of style.

For more about etiquette in a wiki, see wiki etiquette.