User:Ryan Vesey/Adopt/How to Edit

How to Edit
So by now you know how to edit pages, one of the most important features of Wikipedia. The interesting bit, however, is getting things to look, well, interesting. There are a number of different bits of code that you can use in your editing to create different effects when the page is saved - they can be as simple as bold text or italics, but different bits of code can be combined to make a very appealing layout.

I should warn you that in most cases, special formatting is frowned upon in articles. It should only be used in certain situations, and when it is necessary to illustrate a particular point. Aside from those cases, text in articles should be just as you see it in this sentence - plain black, with only the occasional wikilink to spice things up.

Here, I'm going to show you what each of the buttons on your editing toolbar does and how to use the particular bit of code it produces. There are rather a lot of them, so what I'm going to do first is show you where you can go to test all this out while you're reading. There are two places: you can go to the main sandbox that everyone uses at Sandbox. This is a special page that is cleaned out every hour automatically, that gives editors a place to play with new code and vandals a place to vandalize other than our articles. The only problem with the sandbox is this: Whatever you save there isn't likely to stay for long, and there is a high chance of you getting hit with a few edit conflicts. So, to avoid that, you can create your own sandbox! On Wikipedia, you are able to tack "subpages" onto your main user page to use for testing things out, writing new articles, or other projects like what we're doing here. This page (User: Ryan Vesey/Adopt) is a subpage of User: Ryan Vesey, and the source of this lesson (User: Ryan Vesey/Adopt/How to Edit) is a subpage of that subpage. You can create user subpages by searching for the page you want to create in the search box. It won't find it, of course, however a red link will appear at the top of the page. Click on that, and edit away! For example, try searching for User: Ryan Vesey/Example and creating it.

To make your sandboxes, we're going to skip a few steps. This is a handy little box that we can use to start making a new page. It will bring you to your own personal sandbox, which you can start using right away. Just replace USERNAME with your username.

Now that you have somewhere to test all this code out in, let's start showing you what all it does. Here we go!


 * Table syntax is complicated, and we'll cover that later on.
 * This is a table.
 * Like I said, we can cover this in a separate lesson if you want. It's not something I'm going to require.
 * rowspan=2| [[Image:Button reflink.png]]
 * Add a reference (footnote)
 * blah blah
 * Two "ref" tags around the reference text.
 * blah blah
 * rowspan=2| References are displayed using the code . There's a fancy bit of coding you can do to make the same reference appear multiple times, demonstrated in the second line. By adding a name="blah" parameter to the first instance of a reference, you can make the same reference appear more than once. I have these footnotes displayed below the table so you can see how they appear.
 * Add a duplicate reference
 * blah blah blah blah
 * The duplicate reference has a slash at the end of the tag.
 * blah blah blah blah
 * }
 * blah blah blah blah
 * }
 * }

The references
(That was a level 4 header, with four equals signs)

Other stuff
You can make lists and indents by adding characters to the beginning of a paragraph, like so:

A space before your paragraph will make the paragraph display in a box with machine font, and will cause it to run off the page if it is long enough. A colon will cause a block indent, with all lines starting away from the edge of the page.

An asterisk (*) will make a bullet. A pound or number sign (#) makes a numbered list.

You can mix and match the last three characters to get several different effects. The only caveat, though, is that you must have a continual line of #'s in order to maintain the numbering. This does not mean, however, that the numbered list has to be displayed at all times. See below for an example: Note that you don't have to hit enter twice when starting a new line from one of these types of paragraphs. However, when you don't use them, you do. Those last two sentences are on a different line from this one in the editing box, but there is no line break when they are displayed.

Have fun!