Sample Guide

Guide to Making Guides

Making guides on a wiki is very easy, with the help of the editing bar you can make a decent looking guide in a few simple steps. We want to keep our wiki as simple and clean looking as possible, so these basic techniques will help you to make your guide easy to read as well as functional. For advanced editing techniques check out the links at the end of this guide, the Meta Wiki is by far the most helpful and informative source for all of your editing needs.

The most important rule is: If you don't know how to do something and you are afraid to try, just put the information you have in there and someone else will come along and fix it up eventually. An alternative to this would be if you are trying to post a very large guide or contribution piece yourself, you may contact us on the forums for tips.

For more on how to create or edit material for this wiki in a consistent format, please see the Wiki Style Guide.

Links and Creating Pages

First, if you do not see a link to the guide page that you want, there is a simple way to create it. In the section that you want to put the main link in, this one for example, type the following:

[[Name of Guide]]

Which translates into: Name of Guide, which has now become a clickable link

The brackets tell the server that the text is a link, and it creates the link for you. If it is a brand new link, the link will take you directly to an edit page.

Headers

If you want to make headers to break up sections of your guide, highlight the text you want to use and click the big A on the editing menu. It will look like this afterward:

== Sample Header ==

This translates into the following when published:

Sample Header

That's it for this section, try to use the headers very sparingly! Do you see how ugly this page looks with all these headers? Let's make sure your pages look much better!

Lists

Lists are another simple thing that you can add easily into your guide.

* Simple lists are just that,
** Indenting lists is simple too!
** start every line
* with a star
** more stars mean
*** deeper levels

This will display as:

• Simple lists are just that,
  • Indenting lists is simple too!
  • start every line
• with a star
  • more stars mean
    • deeper levels

Numbered Lists:

# Numbered lists
## Are easy too.
## Same Basic Concept
# Different end result.

This will display as:

1. Numbered lists
   1. Are easy too.
   2. Same Basic Concept
2. Different end result.

For more list examples, go here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:List

Tables

Tables are great for organizing information, they may be a bit more complicated than lists, but they look great!

We have a specific style that we would like everyone to use for their tables. Please use {{DefTable}} in your table header whenever possible, as shown here:

{| {{DefTable}}

DefTable sets the color of table, padding, and size of border. This keeps tables consistent and makes styles easy to update throughout the wiki wherever this template is used. See Template:DefTable for details on use.

Sample table code:

{| {{DefTable}}
|+ This is the table title
! left side box 1
| right side box 1
|   <-- Just add "|" to add more horizontal cells.
|-  <-- This denotes the end of a line.
! left box 2  <-- Using "!" instead of "|" makes the cell's text appear centered and in bold.
| right box 2
| additional box on same line
|
|-
| box 3 left
| box 3 center
| box 3 second center
| box 3 right
|}

NOTE: The "<-- text" parts are comments for your benefit and should not be included in an actual table.

The above code displays like this:

This is the table title

left side box 1	right side box 1
left box 2	right box 2	additional box on same line
box 3 left	box 3 center	box 3 second center	box 3 right

If you want a bit more space between the text and the table's borders use {{DefTable|cellpad=5}} (default cellpad is 4) in the table header.

Image Insertion

NOTE: For more advanced image insertion you can use the Imagebox template. For example, use {{Imagebox|image=ImageName|iwidth=220px|text=Your text here.}} to add a box with an image and some text underneath it to a page. See Template:Imagebox for advanced instructions.

Assuming that your image is already uploaded, here is how you insert them in the page.

Image embedding syntax without type specification displays the image inline without any frame or visible caption.

For example:

[[Image: tst.png|abc]]

This will display as 'abc'. The caption substitutes the 'title' attribute of the generated HTML image tag.

To add the uploaded image to an article as a thumbnail, one can write:

[[Image: file name including extension |thumb|caption]]

You can also specify the size of the image. However, the default thumbnail width can be set in the preferences, so typically it is better not to specify "px", in order to respect the users' preferences. If the original size of the image is smaller than the specified size, it will not be enlarged.

Thus

[[Image: tst.png|thumb|50px|abc]]

is not enlarged, while the following is shown at 50px wide:

[[Image:Gelderland-Position.png|thumb|50px|abc]]

This information was pulled from the meta wiki. (source)

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This is all that you really need to help contribute to the Wiki, for advanced editing tips and guides, check out the links below:

• Meta Wiki Help Index
• Wiki Text Formatting
• Wiki List Creation & Formatting
• Wiki Table Formatting

Signing Your Contributions

I almost forgot, you can sign your contributions! All you have to do is click the signature looking thing in the editing bar, or just type this:

--~~~~

Which displays like the one under this line of text.

--NameHere 00:00, 01 January 2011 (PDT)

Please note that you should always sign your contributions on talk pages, but never sign anywhere else. Article pages with signatures should have the signatures removed.

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Consult the User's Guide for information on using the wiki software.

Getting started:

• Configuration settings list
• MediaWiki FAQ
• MediaWiki release mailing list