Introduction

Building a page with our online Wiki content editor is easy. You don't have to know all kinds of HTML code. You can just enter your text. With a few extra keystrokes you can change the style of your text, you can link to other pages and you can easily include pictures!

Here's our quick guide to Wiki to help you along.

Update to Wiki Parsing

In January 2007 we updated our Wiki Syntax to match the most common style now used by Media Wiki and the incredibly successful Wikipedia project.

To find out more please see the WikiSyntaxUpdate page WikiSyntaxUpdate

The WikiMedia Quicky Markup Cheatsheet

The Full WikiMedia Markup Reference

accepted HTML

Wiki Syntax ToDos

To Create a new Page

Put a title in two brackets like [[My New WikiPage]] to create this: My New WikiPage

Text Styles

Headlines: In order to get text into a larger headline text style, just put equals signs - = - on either side of the headline. The first = must start the line.

====Medium Headline==== would give you something like this:

Medium Headline

=Biggest Headline= would give you something like this:

Biggest Headline

For simple text styles like italics and bold type, you can use simple HTML, or you can use wiki formatting (this is taken from MediaWiki Help:Formatting

preformatted text is done with
a space at the 
beginning of the line

Pictures

There are two steps involved in making a new picture or image display on your Wiki page.

First you need use the "Choose File" tool at the bottom of your Wiki editing page. This will let you select an image file (a JPG, JPEG or GIF image, for example) from your computer. When you upload it and save your file, that image will be available for you to embed within your Wiki content.

In order to make the image or picture actually show up, you will need to use the name of the picture, as assigned by the Wiki editor at the bottom of the page, within the body of your content. So if you just selected an image as "picture1" then you can make that image /picture display by putting the name "picture1" in between curly brackets.

For example, if you had select the Yahoo! logo to upload as "picture1", then typing

{ {picture1} }

would make the image show up like this:

Be sure to use the name of the image that the Wiki web page has assigned to your image and not the name of the image as you named it on your computer. If you typed { {yahoo_logo.gif} } instead of { {picture1} } your image would not be displayed.

If you want to make your image or picture display in a certain way you can do that too. You can align the picture to the center, to the left or to the right of the page. You can give the image a border or scale the image down to a smaller size (i.e for a thumbnail view).

Here are some code examples to help you see what you can do:

{ {picture1|align="left" width="50" height="50"} } would make the image you uploaded as "picture1" show up aligned to the left and sized down to 50 pixels wide by 50 pixels high. Or, like this:

{ {picture1|align="right"} } would make the same image show up aligned to the right but at normal size. Like this:

{ {picture1|border=5} }

would make the same image show up with a border of 5 around it, like this:

Links

To link to another page, just put the title of the page between a double set of square brackets [[ ]].

To link to an external site, you can just type the URL. Or, if you want it to appear with a different name, you can enclose it in a single set of square brackets along with the name you'd like to show up as.

So, for example, [http://www.yahoo.com Visit Yahoo!)] would give you this: Visit Yahoo!

Just like any other text, you can also make it show up in a headline text style simply by placing equals signs on either side of it.

So, you could make the "Visit Yahoo!" text into a medium sized headline.

===[http://www.yahoo.com Visit Yahoo!]=== would give you this:

Visit Yahoo!

For more of the MediaWiki Link syntax, visit their help page http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Links. It is only a little more complicated to make an image clickable as a link. Just like the example above, you put the two pieces in between double parentheses. First is the URL to link to and the second is the code for the picture. (See [#pictures notes on pictures] for more detail.) Once again you separate the two pieces with the "pipe" (|) character.

[| { {picture1} }]

would give you this: [" class="external autonumber" title="http://www.yahoo.com|" target='_blank'>[1]]

Tables

The wiki syntax allows you to create tables without knowing HTML as well. To see the details on table formatting, visit the MediaWiki help page - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Tables.