Help:Editing
From Eliafamily
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.
