Help:Editing
From Eliafamily
Contents |
Overview
The first thing you need to know is: have no fear: you can't break these pages! In other words, even if you have no experience with anything on the web, give it a try. The whole idea of a "wiki" web site is to make it as easy as possible for people to contribute to building the web site. So by all means, give it a try.
And you really can't break anything. In the worst case scenario, a page can always be deleted or even "rolled back" to a previous version of the page (to exactly how it looked before your changes). More likely, though, only minor changes will be needed - formatting fixed, style altered to keep it in line with other pages, errors corrected. And anyone can do that - any changes you make can be further changed until the web site is accurate and up to date. That's the beauty of a wiki-based web site.
This guide itself can be edited by anyone. If you learn how to do something cool, take the time to explain it here to others. I expect this guide to grow. Use the table of contents to find what you're looking for.
The Mechanics of Editing (the Edit page)
When you use this website, you are either looking at a page someone wrote, or you are editing a page (that someone else wrote, that you wrote, or that you are creating for the first time). The top of the page will say "Editing:" followed by the name of the page you are editing. The page will show the Edit Toolbar:
the Edit Box (a large text box you can type in), and a few other elements below the Edit box.
The Edit Box
In general, whatever you type in the Edit box will appear on the page. You can create a useful, helpful web page just by typing what you want in the Edit Box and hitting Save page - and then, the whole world can read what you've written.
Of course, most web pages you see on this site also have a bit of formatting. Anything you see on a page other than plain text is formatted in some way. Pages usually have Headings (which appear in the table of contents), text in bold or italics, links to other pages (lit up in blue or red), images, tables, and other things. In order to acheive these effects, you use a little bit of "code". As an example, if you want a phrase to appear in bold, you surround the phrase with 3 apostrophes on either side, like this:
Surround '''some words with''' apostrophes = Surround some words with apostrophes
Okay, so that's how you do bold - what about the other stuff? We'll deal with some of the other stuff later in the guide. If you want to know more, here's some suggestions:
- Use the Edit Toolbar (see next section).
- Read guides available on wikipedia (see External links section)
- Find a page on this site you like and hit the Edit button. You don't need to really edit the page - just look at the text in the Edit Box and see if you can figure out how it was done.
The Edit Toolbar
The easiest way to do simple formatting is to use the editing buttons, shown above. (For some functions, you might want to highlight text before you click a button). Below is a list of what the buttons do, in order of their appearance on the button bar.
- Bold - make your text bold.
- Italics - make your text italicized.
- Internal link - link to a page on the Elia Family Project web site. If you want to do it without the button, do something like this [[Main Page]]. This will show up as Main Page. CaSe MattErS!
- External link - link to a web page not part of the wiki you are editing. If you want to do it without the button, do something like this [http://www.google.com Google Homepage]. This will show up as Google Homepage.
- Create new section within the page.
- Insert image from this wiki. Note: To insert an image that is not on this page, just insert the url, for example, http://example.com/image.jpg. You can also upload an image by clicking on the upload file link in the toolbox.
- Link to a media file (sound or movie). If your video file is not on the internet already, you can host it on one of the websites listed here. Editthis.info does not allow you to upload files (although you will be able to with a Premium account).
- Mathematical formula Help:Math
- Ignore wikipedia formatting - what was used to show http://example.com/image.jpg in plain text instead of as a picture.
- Your signature - only if you are signed in (you don't have to register or log in to edit this wiki, but you can).
- Horizontal line - use sparingly.
Below The Edit Box
Below the Edit box is a text box marked "Summary". It is not necessary to use this space; if something is shown here by default then leave it as is.
Below the Summary box are two checkboxes: This is a minor edit and Watch this page. It can be helpful if you check the minor edit box for small edits (particularly if you are fixing a small mistake you made after Saving an edit) - this can be very helpful if it is ever necessary to roll a page back to an earlier version. Watch this page allows you to track changes on your "watchlist" (an advanced function that you can learn about if you are doing a lot of contributing to the web site.
The "Show preview" button is a very helpful button during editing. If you want to know what your edits will look like to a reader, hit this button. You can use it as many times as you like. You could also, of course, "Save pages" to see what your edits will look like, but it is better to only save your changes at the very end. If ever it becomes necessary to revert to an earlier version of the page, it is easier if only one version is created per edit, rather than several.
Save page will make your edit the new version of the page in question. Think carefully before you overwrite or alter someone else's work, but don't feel shy about doing so when you are altering a page for the better.
Show changes is useful if you want to compare the current version to the most recent version.
Cancel obviously cancels any work you've done since the last Save. You can also cancel by closing the browser or hitting your browser's Back button.
Editing help, as you probably know, opens this guide.
