User:Retarius/Wikimarkup Guide

Wiki Text Links (copied from a question I asked on the Help Desk)
I would like to use more complex techniques in editing and I'm trying to find a full description of what is possible with the wiki markup language. I can't find a general tutorial or menu that shows all functions available and how to use them. Retarius | Talk 05:01, 21 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I hope you get some good answers. As a recent editor, this has been a real bugbear for me too! Pee Tern (talk) 05:10, 21 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Try How to edit a page, or Help:Contents/Editing Wikipedia a subpage of the main help menu. -- Quiddity (talk) 05:12, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
 * If you want more advanced details, see: Help:Parserfunctions, Help:Magic words, Help:Template, Help:HTML in wikitext, and Help:Category. Basically read the entire MediaWiki Handbook, which has four large sections: for readers, for editors (this section tells the most about wikitext markup, naturally), for moderators, and for administrators. Also melt your brain on the Editor's index, which gives a pretty full description of what is possible on Wikipedia. A solid introduction to Wikipedia editing could easily fill up a year of college-level work. And that would be a fun course to teach. But on Wikipedia, everything you see is built by and for people who self-educate. I suggest that you take some notes on a user sub-page with links to the manuals you are reading. Also see the Google custom template, which has a table of examples which link to a list of places I have found handy for answering questions that come up in the course of Wikipedia editing (I wrote the table of examples, so I put in the links I use routinely when looking up answers to questions on the Help desk). --Teratornis (talk) 07:29, 21 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Thank you all - especially Teratornis - that's just what I was looking for! Retarius | Talk 05:56, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Page division

 * First, thanks again,Teratornis, for the advice you gave me a while back on advanced editing sources. It's proving very helpful in writing my first article.


 * I can't find an answer to this, though: I want to put two columns of text on my User Page in the "Useful Links" section. The one on the left will be the Wikipedia Links that I've already listed - the other column on the right would be External Links. (I checked Help desk archives and searched all the Editor's commands with Control-F, but no joy.) Retarius | Talk 04:08, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I gave an example of how to do this on your userpage. There are other ways. If this isn't what you want just revert. Cheers.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 04:44, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
 * It's good that you tried searching before asking. With enough practice, you can find the answer to almost any question about Wikipedia that has an answer, because people have written, somewhere, about almost every important editing issue. (When they haven't, then you could be the first to write about some topic. A cool aspect of Wikipedia is that everything we do to help ourselves here can also be useful to other people, so Wikipedia is like a giant system of Pay it Forward. We benefit from all the work by people who came before, and we add our little bits to the knowledge pile to help the next wave of people.) finds several previous questions and answers relating to your question. That search also finds a number of results that aren't relevant, but some relevant results do appear on the first page, and they are recognizable from the sample text that Google displays. If you don't find results from your first attempt to search the Help desk, try again with different terms, fewer terms, or more general terms. Some things can be pretty hard to find, however, for example when you don't guess the particular synonym people have used to describe a particular topic. But the more you read the friendly manuals, the more you learn Wikipedia's jargon, and the better you get at searching. You'll know you're making progress when you can answer questions on the Help desk even though you don't know the answers when you first read the questions. --Teratornis (talk) 20:49, 5 March 2008 (UTC)