Quick Reference

1 General Guidelines

Please be respectful of other contributors and of those who make facilities available for the rest of us to use.

"You can learn a lot just by watching" – Yogi Berra. You can always refer to Isle du Bois Unit and Hills and Hollows as examples of how pages should ideally look.

When editing, you can use the Preview button to refresh the page and see your edits without saving (without creating a new stored version of the page) after each and every comma. But you will need to save when switching between the Edit tab and the Edit Source tab.

If you are new at contributing to wikis, then your life will be ever so much happier if you will use the Visual Editor by editing with the Edit tab rather than trying to directly edit the wiki markup language with the Edit Source tab. There is no rule against directly editing in wiki markup. And there are still a few useful things you can only do by working directly in wiki markup. But it would be a real shame for a learning curve to get in the way of your actually contributing content, and that is why some people put a whole lot of time into developing the Visual Editor.

Whenever you do decide to start learning wiki markup, see the Advanced Reference. There is enough there to become a power user – at least with regard to text and links (but not so much with embedded objects, which is not really done on this wiki).

You can contribute text without reading this section. But please do read and understand this section before you add headings.

One thing you can do much better in wiki markup is control when something that looks like a heading will or won't be treated as a heading by the software. And since there are conventions on this wiki about when that should happen, it is useful to work through this section before you add headings.

Real Headings. You will rarely need to add this type of heading. These headings begin and end with two to five equal signs (==Level 2 Heading==, ===Level 3 Heading===). They are interpreted by both the reader and the wiki software as headings, which means (among other things) that they automatically show up in the table of contents at the top of the page. But one of the design choices in implementing this wiki is to keep the table of contents relatively short and clean. So you will not generally need to add any real headings unless you are either making a lengthy contribution or reorganizing a page.

Level 2 Headings. These are the highest level heading it is possible to have on a page and will always be real headings in the form: ==Level 2 Heading==. These are the headings that automatically create a horizontal line.

Apparent Headings. This is the type of heading that you will typically add. These headings are interpreted by the reader as headings, but are interpreted by the wiki as regular text. This keeps the table of contents short and clean.

Level 3 Headings. These will usually be apparent headings using big-bold text in the form: '''<big>Level 3 Heading</big>'''.

Level 4 Headings. Except on very lengthy pages, these will be apparent headings using bold text in the form: '''Level 4 Heading'''.

Level 5 Headings. With rare exception, these will be apparent headings using bold-italics text in the form: '''''Level 5 Heading'''''.

You can also contribute text without reading this section, but this is a neat trick that cannot (yet) be done through the Visual Editor.

The Edit tab makes it fairly intuitive to create links to other web pages, both internally within the wiki and externally to other websites.

But if you want to go further and learn how to link to a particular location on a page, or how to create an anchor that will allow others to link to a particular location on a page that you are editing, see the Links section of the Advanced Reference. Click on this link and you will see what anchors let you do).

You can read this section if you get frustrated in Visual Editor.

The other thing you can do by working directly with wiki markup is to exercise more control over how things on the page behave. This is especially true in Visual Editor when you delete the space between two paragraphs and their behaviors merge in ways that you did not intend. When that happens, you can either try again, being careful to maintain the separation between the two paragraphs, or you can peek inside the Edit Source tab where it is much easier to maintain that difference.

Fans of WordPerfect will think of the Edit Source tab as Reveal Codes to understand exactly why the text is behaving in a certain way.

To sign up to contribute to the wiki, or to report any broken links or other issues to the Wiki Administrator.