Help:Formatting
The Wiki is a collaboratively edited document. This tutorial may help you to understand how to write content using the software.
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.
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 may be to look at Wiki articles for examples.
How to link
If 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:
Redirects
Pages need redirects if:
- they have abbreviations (eg. HUD redirect to Head-up display).
- they have symonyms (eg. FlightGear Wizard redirect to FlightGear Launch Control).
- there are various spellings or common mis-spellings (eg. Flight Gear redirect to FlightGear).
With redirects we can decrease the time people will need to find the article they were looking for. Most people get discouraged if they have to search to a long list of possible results.
To make a redirect, add the following code to an empty page:
#REDIRECT[[Page name]]