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Content Formatting Help

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[edit] Wiki Formatting Tools

When you click the edit link for any page (or page section), you switch to edit mode.

A series of buttons at the top left help you add wiki syntax for certain formatting, if you choose to use buttons. Wiki syntax is easy to remember and you may prefer to type the formatting.

If you do use the buttons, you'll use the first four most often, for bold and italic, and to create internal and external links.

Highlight the text you want to modify, then click the appropriate button. Go to the SandBox to experiment if you like.

[edit] Bold and Italic Formatting

  • To make bold text in MediaWiki, surround the text string with triple single-quotes, like this: 
    '''text to be bold'''
    . You can do this manually, or highlight the text string and click the button for bold formatting.
  • The same process works for italic text, except use double single-quotes: 
    ''text to be italic''
    .

[edit] Internal Links

Adding internal links can be super easy or a bit tricky depending on what it is you are linking to.

MediaWiki syntax is quite robust and allows you to link to page sections as well as pages. You may want to use a link label other than the title of the page the link goes to (useful when pages are named poorly as noted in the next paragraph). Internal link syntax for all these types of links is explained here.

Important note: MediaWiki does NOT care about camelCase or PascalCase, so you don't have to name your wiki pages with those odd conventions; in fact, you should not or you just make more work customizing link labels for every other instance of that page link.

[edit] Basic Link to New Page

Type the name of the new page you want to start, then surround the text string with double straight brackets, for example: 

[[New Page Title]]

wich creates a red text link like this New Page Title

You can achieve the same effect by highlighting the text string, then clicking the internal link button.

There are a few important things to note here:

  1. The page is not officially created until you follow the link and save content in the page edit window.
  2. The new page will be named exactly as the link label you typed (and the links are case and space sensitive), so make sure you're creating a sensible link label and page title.
  3. When content is saved at the page destination, the link label changes from red to blue, permanently.

[edit] Linking to a Particular Page Section

The syntax for a link to a section on a page starts with the name of the page, followed by an octothorpe (#), followed by the section header (exactly as written), followed by a pipe (|), followed by the section header name again, then double straight brackets surrounding the whole string, for example: 

[[Content Formatting Help#Basic Link to New Page|Basic Link to New Page]]

which produces a link having a label with the section header, and pointing to that particular page and section, like this Basic Link to New Page (note this points to the section just above).

[edit] Linking to an Existing Page, but using a Custom Link Label

The syntax is similar to the syntax just above. However the link points to a page, and not a section. The link label is not the name of the page. Start with the original page name, followed by a pipe (|), followed by the new label to use, then surround the whole string with double straight brackets, for example: 

[[SandBox|Sandbox Practice]]

which produces a page link having a custom label, Sandbox Practice (note this points to the SandBox).

[edit] External Links

Adding external links is a simple three step process:

  1. Type or paste the URL of the external link.
  2. Follow the URL with a blank space, then type the link label you want to use.
  3. Either highlight the whole string (steps 1 and 2) and click the external link button (the one with the globe on it), or surround the whole string with single straight brackets: 
[http://www.stc.org STC]

which produces STC

Note: All external links are easily identifiable by the little blue arrow that follows the link label. Authors should never create internal links using the external link syntax, to avoid confusion over the meaning of the link cue. That means, never create internal links using full URLs of a page; use the internal syntax discussed above.

[edit] Comprehensive Resources (External)

These are all excellent resources for learning about using MediaWiki. (Note: WikiPedia and many other Sister Projects use MediaWiki for the wiki backend, and the information below comes from some of those sites.)

Retrieved from "http://stc-on.org/wiki/Content_Formatting_Help"