Help:Basic Wiki Syntax
Welcome, wiki editors!
This page is for novice wiki editors who are looking for a place to start. Regardless of skill level, anyone can make contributions to the wiki with just a few clicks and some typing. Please don’t be intimidated, as you’ve got the support of a team of experienced collaborators and proofreaders.
The number one rule of wiki editing, is to be bold. Dive in and make changes. Other people can correct mistakes later, so have confidence, and give it a try! There can be all kinds of editing conventions, rules, and philosophy governing the editing of wiki pages, but the be bold rule overrides these!
Remember – you can't break finiki; all edits can be reversed, fixed or improved later. finiki is allowed to be imperfect. So go ahead, edit an article and help improve finiki.
Syntax Conventions that we would like you to use
Enclosing something with <ref></ref>tags will cause a footnote/reference to be generated. At the bottom of the page then put:
== References == <references />
What was placed in the <ref></ref>tags will show up at the bottom of the page.
Note that what shows up at the bottom of the page must be edited at the top - i.e. between the <ref></ref>tags.
Example:
If you type the following in the edit box:
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Dividend cycles for many Canadian companies are shown below:<ref>"Shakespeare", [https://www.shakesprimer.com/divlist.htm Dividend Cycles for Canadian Companies], copied with permission of the author, revised to Wiki format, updated and expanded.</ref> The stock sector descriptions vary from source to source; those used are generally taken from the descriptions at iShares and are sometimes different from the sector descriptions used at the stock quotation source TMX. == References == |
It will be displayed as:
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Dividend cycles for many Canadian companies are shown below:[1] The stock sector descriptions vary from source to source; those used are generally taken from the descriptions at iShares and are sometimes different from the sector descriptions used at the stock quotation source TMX. References
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Syntax examples
If you are writing a section of text and want to link to another page here, enclose the page title with double brackets as [[Page to be linked]].
To change the displayed title and remove underscores in the name, use the '|' separator: [[I_Am_Here|I Am Here]].
- Examples
[[Free and open source personal finance software]]produces Free and open source personal finance software[[Free and open source personal finance software | Finance software]]produces Finance software
If you are writing a section of text and want to link to another site, type in the url, add a space, and then type your text. Then enclose all with '[' at the beginning and ']' at the end.
- Example: In your article use:
[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:FAQ MediaWiki FAQ]which produces MediaWiki FAQ
If you are writing a section of text and want to footnote it, immediately after the text, ie, no space, type <ref> and the name of the reference immediately followed by a comma. There should be no space between <ref> and the name of the reference followed by a comma. Leave a space and type the url.
If you wish to add more text after the url, type a comma. End by typing </ref>.
- Example:
<ref>Princeton WordNet, http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=pension, viewed 24 December, 2008</ref>
If you do not wish to add more text after the url, do not type a comma. Just end by typing </ref>.
- Example:
<ref>[http://www.pensionsadvisoryservice.org.uk/Pension_Rights/Pension_Increases/ The Pensions Advisory Service]</ref>
Use a : to indent a line. A colon at the beginning the first line of a table will indent the table.
Article titles and case-sensitivity
One of the most confusing things for new MediaWiki authors is the case sensitivity of article titles. For example, the link [[Basic Wiki Syntax]] is not the same as [[Basic wiki syntax]]. A search for basic wiki syntax would however find both articles. So what's going on here?
There are rules:
- When searching, search terms are case-insensitive.
- When editing, internal links are case-sensitive except for the first letter.
- When displaying an article, MediaWiki automatically:
- Capitalizes the first letter of the title, in both the article title and the URL.
- Converts spaces to underscores in the URL.
Templates
Templates are Wiki tools that allow pre-formatted entries to be made. Templates are included in a page by inserting the name of the template between double curly brackets. The content of the template will then be inserted at that point. For example, the syntax {{Fact}} will display the "Fact" template, which warns that a citation is needed, as shown below: