Help:Formatting

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Wiki is a collaboratively edited encyclopedia to which you can contribute. This tutorial will help you to write good wiki articles.

The following pages will discuss features of Wiki, giving style and content guidance, information about the Wiki community, and important Wiki policies and conventions.

This is a basic tutorial, not an extensive manual.

Formatting

Formatting Wiki articles 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 text codes to create particular elements of the page (e.g. headings). This "language" is known as Wikitext (or Wiki-markup) and is designed for ease of editing.

Bold and italics

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

You type You get
''italic'' italic

'''bold'''

bold

'''''bold italic'''''

bold italic

Headings and subheadings

Headings and subheadings are an easy way to improve the organization of an article. If you can see two or more distinct topics being discussed, you can break up the article by inserting a heading for each section.

Headings can be created like this:

  • == Heading ==
  • === Subheading ===

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

HTML

HTML code can be used in pages to produce more advanced formatting such as colors, tables, and edit page layout. However, you do not need to know HTML to use Wiki and follow formatting conventions.

Formatting conventions

It is a Wiki convention to mark in bold the names of an article's subject when they are first mentioned in the article. For example, the article Boeing KC-135E begins:

The Boeing KC-135E is the only aircraft in FlightGear wich can refuel other planes in air.

Wiki links

Linking Wiki articles together is very important. These easily created links allow users to access information related to the article they are reading and greatly add to Wiki's utility.

When to link

The easiest way to learn when to link is to look at Wiki articles for examples. If you are trying to decide whether to make a link or not, ask yourself "If I were reading this article, would the link be useful to me?" Usually link the first, and only the first, occurrence of a word/term in the article, that does not have an implicitly understood definition.

How to link

When you want to make a link to another Wiki page (called a wiki link) you have to put it in double square brackets, like this:

[[Aircraft]] = Aircraft

If you want the display text of the link to have a different title, you can do so by adding the pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and other keyboards) followed by the alternative name. For example:

[[Target page|display text]] = display text

You can make a link to a specific section of a page like so:

[[Target page#Target section|display text]] = display text

If you want the display text of the link to appear in italics or bold, nest the double square brackets for the link within the multiple apostrophes that delimit the italicized or bold text, like this:

''[[Main Page]]'' = Main Page

Please check your links to ensure they point to the correct article.

Categories

You can also put the article in a category with others in a related topic. Just type [[Category:]], and put the name of the category between the colon and the brackets.

To make a link to a Category page (for example, as a reference for further research), simply put a colon (:) at the beginning of the "Category" tag, like this:

[[:Category:Aircraft]]

The above code would produce the following:

Category:Aircraft

It is very important to put in the correct categories so that other people can easily find your work. The best way to find which categories to put in is to look at pages on similar subjects, and check which categories they use. For example if you write an article about a type of tree, you may look at an article on another type of tree to see which categories could be appropriate.