Help:Editing

Please log in before editing, so we know who made what changes. To log in, click the link in the upper right corner of the web page.

The basics

To edit a page (after you log in):

1. Type or cut-and-paste plain text into editing box on the wiki page. Separate paragraphs with a blank line. For regular text, don't include any spaces before the beginning of the line. When copying from a Word document, most formatting gets lost or messed up.

2. In the Summary box, type a few words about what you did to the page.

3. Click the "Save page" button. YOUR CHANGES ARE NOT SAVED UNTIL YOU CLICK THIS BUTTON. Save early and often.

Headings

For headings (like that big bold thing just above this line), use equal signs to indicate a heading level. Level 1 headings look like this:

 = Main topic =

Level 2 headings look like this:

 == Sub-topic ==

Ditto for level 3, etc.

Emphasis and bullets

For boldface, preceed and follow the text with three (3) apostrophes (single quotes). Weird, but true. Or click the "B" button in the toolbar above the editing box.

For bullets, start the paragraph with an asterisk (*).

For italics, preceed and follow the text with two (2) apostrophes. Don't use underlining, because underlined text looks like a link when it's not, which is confusing.

Links

Wiki pages: To create a link to another wiki page, type the exact title of the page within double-square-brackets, like this:

 [ [ Implementation details ] ]

(Don't leave spaces between the brackets -- I left spaces here so you can see what it looks like.)

Or, click the "Internal link" on the toolbar above the edit box (it's the "Ab" button). Then replace "Link title" with the title of the page you want to link to.

External pages: To create a link to a web page outside the wiki, just type or paste the complete URL, including the http part. The wiki page will display it as a link.

Or, click the "External link" button on the toolbar (it's the button that looks like a globe). Yout get text like this:

link title

(Omit the space between the [ and the text). Replace the URL with be the web address that you want, and "title" with the text that you want to appear as the link.

Creating a new page

Type the name of the new page, enclosed in double square brackets, like this:

 [ [ Ziplining in Maui ] ]

(Don't put spaces between the square brackets, though -- spaces appear here, so that the wiki doesn't create an actual "Ziplining in Maui" page.) Make the name specific and clear.

The name of the page will appear in red. When you click it, the wiki creates a new page with that name. Type text into it.

If you want the name of the page to be different than the text of the link to the page, use a vertical bar (pipe, or |) between the real name of the new page and link that you want to appear to the page. For example:

 [ [ Ziplining in Maui|click here for fun ] ]

Quotes and examples

To display text in Courier and enclosed in a box (like the examples on this page), start each line with at least one space.

Adding your name, the date, and the time

To add a signature, click the "Your signature with timestamp" button on the toolbar above the edit box (it's the second-to-last button). You see something that looks like this, but without the spaces:

- - ~ ~ ~ ~

When you save the page, your name, date, and time appear.

Watching the page for changes

If you'd like to track when changes are made to the page you are editing, click the "Watch this page" check box just below the editing page. The wiki adds the page to your watch list, which you can see any time you are logged in, by clicking the "my watchlist" link at the top of the web page.