Editing Guide

Editing can be done in many different ways, but we have found the following MediaWiki documentation useful: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Editing.

Below you can find a cheatsheet with commonly used wikitext mark up, accompanied with a few remarks of quirks we discovered while working with wiki-to-print.

But first of all, it's good to know is that there are two editors that you can use to edit your text:

Visual editor

• to use it, click Edit
• uses a WYSIWYG editor
• Visual editor user guide

Wiki syntax editor

• to use it, click Edit source
• uses a specific mark up language: wiki syntax
• Wiki syntax user guide

Cheatsheet + remarks

MediaWiki uses "wikitext" to mark up text with bolds or italics, and to headers, images, media, links, footnotes, tables, etc.

Making a new page

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Starting_a_new_page

• It might be easiest to search for the pagename that you want to create, and if it does not exist yet, then you can click on the red link to create that page.

Renaming a page

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Moving_a_page

• MediaWiki counter-intuitively calls this "move page"

Headers

• A header1 is written as: =Title here=
• Subtitles can be marked up as any other headers (header2 ==Title here==, header3 ===Title here===, etc.)

Images

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Images

• If you have images, and you want to work with captions, we suggest to use frame or thumb as image formats, these make the caption show up.
  • In wiki syntax: You can add the image width (in pixels) and caption in the image element ([[File:Imagename.jpg|thumb|480px|caption here]]).
  • In the visual editor: click on the image > edit > caption.

Lists

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Lists

• Make sure that you add a line break before and after your list.

Links

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Links

Bibliography

• We have used lists in the past to structure bibliographies, using the * symbol at the start of each line.

Footnotes

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Cite

Quotes

• You can use <blockquote>Your quote here</blockquote>. Make sure this is separated from the body of your text with line breaks before and after the <blockquote> tags.

Categories

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Categories

You can create categories or add your page to a category, by adding the following syntax to your page:

[[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]

• Often these category assigners are placed at the bottom of a page.

Etherpads in the wiki

We installed an extension on the CC working that makes it possible to attach an etherpad to a wiki page. During the making of Towards a Minor Tech, this feature was used used for peer-annotations during the writing process.

To add an etherpad to a wiki page:

1. Copy this line of code to the writing area:

<div class="pad"><eplite id="CHANGEME" show-chat="false" /></div>

2. Change the id="" value from CHANGEME into an etherpad name of choice.

For example into the title of your contribution.

NOTE: You cannot use spaces in the id="" value.

3. Scroll down and click "Save page" to save the page.

4. The etherpad should appear on the right side of the screen.

Skins

The interface of MediaWiki's are called skins.

The default skin that is used on this wiki is Vector, but more skins are installed.

You can change the skin for yourself only, by following these steps:

1. Click on Preferences in the right-top corner.
2. Click on Appearance.
3. Select a skin from the list.
4. Click Save.

NOTE: This does not change the skin for everyone. It only changes for your user account.

Other links that can be useful

• Timezone settings of the wiki: under Preferences > Appearance > Time offset