Difference between revisions of "Help:Markup"

Revision as of 01:21, 19 November 2010

Wiki pages are designed to be easy to create and edit, and require a minimal amount of technical knowledge. If you can create a forum post, you can edit a wiki page. Read this page for some basic theory and common codes, and you'll be well on your way. Also keep in mind that you can always click the edit tab on an existing page to see how it was formatted.

For information on how to create pages, read the New article help page.

Wiki Code

Wikis use their own syntax (markup) for formatting text. Below is a list of common syntax you can use to format your pages. A more extensive guide to wiki editing can be found on Wikimedia's site.

Text Formatting

Text Layout

Footers (Sources/Citations)

Add <references/> where you want the list of citations to appear (usually at the foot of the page), and the list will appear thus:

Section Headers

To keep pages organized, separate the text into sections. Section headers do this nicely, and are automatically added to the table of contents. Headers should be hierarchical and descending, as needed. There are several levels of headers formed by equals signs that will display in descending point size and font colour.

The single equal sign is not used in articles. It's automatically used for formatting the title of pages. Use the double equal signs for the first heading.

Do not put numbers at the beginning of headings as the wiki automatically inserts them in the Table of Contents box.

The Table of Contents Box

Wiki format automatically creates ToC boxes like you see at the top of this page, after 4 headings have been created. If you have only 3 headlines but need a ToC box then type __toc__.

Lists

One of the most common formatting tool is the list used to present short facts in sequence.

Soft Returns

The wiki script ignores single returns. If you wish to create a new paragraph you need to hit return twice to leave one blank line. If you want to list something directly underneather another line of text then you need to use <br>

Preformatted Boxes

These boxes will go as wide as the text so to control their width you will need to use <br>.

Are you used for:

• pasting preformatted text
• algorithm descriptions
• program source code
• ASCII art

You make one by simply adding a space before the beginning of a sentence.

Aren't I dramatic!

Creating Links

Creating links is very simple and there are two methods to do so: an external site link for outside sources and an internal site link for content inside the DiabloWiki.

Images

To insert an image, just add the following code, [[File:filename.jpg]]. Make sure you have the correct file extension. The valid image files for DiabloWiki are:

• .gif
• .jpg
• .png

Images are automatically justified to the left side on a page, but it's easy to change this with variables, to make boxes around images and to change their size. Read more about images on the Image Help page.

Images as Links

An image can be used to link elsewhere than its own image page. To do this, simply add a variable to the image like this:

[[File:Diablo_III_Logo.jpg|link=http://www.diablowiki.net/]]

Will display like this:

The size attribute is used here to avoid blowing the image up to a massive size. To learn more about how to use and format images, see the Image Help page.

This works with both internal and external links.

Categories

Every page should be slotted into at least one category, to enable others to find it easily. If you are making new articles, it's very important to make sure they are put in the correct category.

• Read more about categories in the Category Help page.

Creating Tables

The syntax for creating table is fairly easy and very logical. Here's a basic example:

{|
! 1
! 2
! 3
|-
| 4
| 5
| 6
|}

That will look like this:

The tables are automatically formatted with the site style so you aren't required to add any style elements. The only time you would need to add an element to the table is if you want to specify a width or want to make a table that is different than the standard DiabloWiki style.

As you can see the wiki code 'looks' like a table and you can expand on this and format more complex tables. It's easy enough to look at other tables as well, to get inspiration if you want to do more advanced things with it.

• Read more about tables in the Table Help page.

Try it out!

There is a special Wiki Sandbox that you can try out your editing skills in, without making unnecessary changes to existing articles.

Further Reading

• Onsite Wiki FAQ
• Advanced image technique placement, making thumbnails, captions, etc can be found in Wikipedia's article on extended image syntax.