Help:Tutorial (Formatting)

From Meta Collab

Tutorial Chapters:

1. Editing
2. Formatting
3. Internal Links
4. External Links
5. Talk Pages
6. Community portal
7. Categories

Contents 1 Wiki markup 2 Bold and italics 3 Headings and subheadings 4 Indenting 4.1 Plain indentations 4.2 Bullet points 4.3 Numbered items 5 ABRI formatting style

[edit] Wiki markup

Writing text in the ABRI website is a bit different from writing on a standard word processor. Instead of a strict "what you see is what you get" approach, wiki uses simple text codes for formatting called the MediaWiki markup language. (It's the combination of Mediawiki -this program- and the MediaWiki markup language that allows for immediate publishing on the web.)

The MediaWiki markup language uses what's known as 'tags' to render and format the text in different ways. Below are some of the more basic and useful tags you might use. For a more comprehensive list, see Editing help. (This link is always availible to the right of the 'Save page' & 'Show preview' buttons when a section or page is in edit mode.)

[edit] Bold and italics

The most commonly used wiki tags are bold and italics. Bolding and italicizing is done by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes ('):

• ''italics'' is rendered as italics. (2 apostrophes on either side)
• '''bold''' is rendered as bold. (3 apostrophes on either side)
• '''''bolded italics''''' is rendered as bolded italics. (2 + 3 = 5 apostrophes on either side)

[edit] Headings and subheadings

Headings and subheadings can be created with the below tags. Each heading and subheading created automatically makes a edit link at the right of the heading which allows for quick editing of that section only.

Headings can be created like this:

• ==Top level heading== (2 equals signs)
• ===Subheading=== (3 equals signs)
• ====Another level down==== (4 equals signs)

If an article has at least four headings, a table of contents will be automatically generated.

[edit] Indenting

There are several ways of indenting in Wikipedia:

[edit] Plain indentations

The simplest way of indenting is to place a colon (:) at the beginning of a line. The more colons you put, the further indented the text will be. A newline (pressing Enter or Return) marks the end of the indented paragraph.

For example:

This is aligned all the way to the left.

:This is indented slightly.

::This is indented more.

is shown as:

This is aligned all the way to the left.

This is indented slightly.

This is indented more.

[edit] Bullet points

You can also indent using bullets, usually used for lists. To insert a bullet, use an asterisk (*). Similar to indentation, more asterisks in front of a paragraph means more indentation.

A brief example:

*First list item

*Second list item

**Sub-list item under second

*Isn't this fun?

Which is shown as:

• First list item
• Second list item
  • Sub-list item under second
• Isn't this fun?

[edit] Numbered items

You can also create numbered lists. For this, use the number sign or hash symbol (#). Again, you can affect the indent of the number by the number of #'s you use.

Example:

#First item

#Second item

##Sub-item under second item

#Third item

Shows up as:

1. First item
2. Second item
   1. Sub-item under second item
3. Third item

[edit] ABRI formatting style

A formatting style guide for contributing to the ABRI site is provided at Protocols.

Continue with the tutorial.