Editing the Wiki

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Welcome to the Dreadnought Project Wiki.

This page is meant to be a very brief introduction to what is involved in editing the site, which incorporates the same technology as is used on Wikipedia.org. As such, editing this site is very similar.

It's very easy to edit the contents of a wiki:

Click the "Edit" page tab at the top of the page you want to edit.

  1. Make changes to the text.
  2. Click the "Save page" button.
  3. Simple as that!

Most Important : Don't Worry

The website saves old versions of pages as you work, so even the worst mistake can be "backed out" later. You can also check the effect of your editing as you go by selecting "Show Preview" below the editing panel before you save your edit.

WikiText

A Wiki is like any other webpages, but generally has simpler formatting. You define the format of your work by using a simple syntax (compared to HTML) called WikiText. Here is a brief glimpse of some things you can do.

Sections

Sections within an article are created by placing the sections' titles within matching pairs of equal signs. For instance, ==WikiText== made the top-level section above, and this section is nested under it by ===Sections===.

Bold and Italic Text

Bold text can be made by surrounding it with triple instances of single quotes, e.g., '''This is bold''' appears as This is bold.

Italic text uses double instances of single quotes, e.g., ''This is italic'' appears as This is italic.

Link to other articles on the site

A link to any other article on the site can be created simply by placing its title inside doubled square brackets. For instance, this WikiText: [[John Arbuthnot Fisher, First Baron Fisher]] creates this: John Arbuthnot Fisher, First Baron Fisher.

If you'd like a more concise string of text to be created, you can place a "pipe" character and then the shorter text to display. For instance, [[John Arbuthnot Fisher, First Baron Fisher|Jackie Fisher]] creates this: Jackie Fisher

Adding Footnotes

Citations are very important to us. The basic form is to delimit your footnote within <ref> and </ref> pair, for instance, this sentence is followed by the following Wikitext to create the footnote seen below: <ref>This is our sample footnote.</ref>.[1]

The editor indicates where the footnotes on a given page should appear by marking the spot with the following WikiText: {{reflist}}. By convention, we place this in its own section, like so: ==Footnotes== {{reflist}}

If you find you have a source that you are using repeatedly, we can create a "citable source template" (a kind of macro) to make its frequent use more efficient in terms of typing. Ask tone to help you do this.

Things to Avoid Doing, Initially

We use a "bot" to maintain the career boxes seen at the foot of articles about Persons or the tables of Ships in a Ship class, etc. If you find yourself wanting to alter such content, contact an experienced editor to learn how.

Learning More

You can learn a lot about Wiki editing by clicking "Edit" on any page you see doing something you'd like to mimic. You can then look at the editing panel and scroll to find the WikiText that produced the effect you were curious about. When in doubt, email another editor, such as "tone" (who can be emailed @dreadnoughtproject.org).

See Also

Footnotes

  1. This is our sample footnote.