Wikipedia:How to edit a page (concise)

This page is intended to provide a concise and printable guide for users hoping to use English-only Wikipedia in a controlled manner. As such, it focuses only on the common editing functions used in Wikipedia and cuts many of the more arcane details such as math functions, foreign language characters, etc. For a more detailed guide, see How to edit a page. Basically anyone can edit Wikipedia. It's a simple and easy way to share your knowledge!

General
To edit a MediaWiki page, click on the "Edit this page" (or just "edit") link at one of its edges. This will bring you to the edit page: a page with a text box containing the wikitext: the editable source code from which the server produces the webpage. Depending on the preferences that have been set, a version of the edit page called preview page appears: in this case the rendered page is also shown; if not you get it by pressing "Show preview", see below.

The edit link of a page showing an old version leads to an edit page with the old wikitext. This allows restoring the old version. However, the edit link of a diff page gives the current wikitext, even if the diff page shows an old version below the table of differences.

After adding to or changing the wikitext it is useful to press "Show preview", which produces the corresponding webpage in your browser but does not make it publicly available yet (not until you press "Publish changes"). Errors in formatting, links, tables, etc., are often much easier to discover from the rendered page than from the raw wikitext.

'''If you are not satisfied you can make more changes and preview the page as many times as necessary. Then write a short edit summary in the small text field below the edit-box and when finished press "Publish changes". Depending on your system, pressing the "Enter" key while the edit box is not active (i.e., there is no typing cursor in it) may have the same effect as pressing "Publish changes".'''

You may find it more convenient to copy and paste the text first into your favorite text editor, edit and spell check it there, and then paste it back into your web browser to preview. This way, you can also keep a local backup copy of the pages you have edited. It also allows you to make changes offline, but before you submit your changes, please make sure nobody else has edited the page since you saved your local copy (by checking the page history), otherwise you may accidentally revert someone else's edits. If someone has edited it since you copied the page, you'll have to merge their edits into your new version (you can find their specific edits by using the "diff" feature of the page history). These issues are handled automatically by the MediaWiki software if you edit the page in your web browser.

Minor edits
When editing a page, a logged-in user has the option of flagging the edit as a "minor edit". This feature is important, because users can choose to hide minor edits in their view of the recent changes page, to keep the volume of edits down to a manageable level.

The wiki markup
In the left column of the table below, you can see what effects are possible. In the right column, you can see how those effects were achieved. In other words, to make text look like it looks in the left column, type it in the format you see in the right column.

Templates
Some part of a page may correspond in the edit box to just a reference to another page, in the form, referring to the page "Template:name" (or if the name starts with a namespace prefix, it refers to the page with that name; if it starts with a colon it refers to the page in the main namespace with that name without the colon). This is called a template. For changing that part of the page, edit that other page. Sometimes a separate edit link is provided for this purpose. A convenient way to put such a link in a template is with a template like m:Template:ed. Note that the change also affects other pages which use the same template.

Separating edits
When moving or copying a piece of text within a page or from another page, and also making other edits, it is useful to separate these edits. This way the diff function can be usefully applied for checking these other edits.