Basic Wiki Formatting

From ElvisCostello

Jump to: navigation, search

Simple editing is one of the major benefits of using a wiki. Users can edit pages without knowing HTML, and still use many of the formatting features of HTML. Please feel free to experiment in the Sandbox.

Contents

Basic Text

Most text does not require any special changes for wiki form. A few basic rules are:

  • Do not indent paragraphs.
  • Leave a single blank line between paragraphs.
  • To create a horizontal line, type 4 or more minus/dash/hyphen (-) characters.
  • There is no need to encode HTML characters like <, >, or &.

Bold, Italic and Fixed-width Text

To mark text as bold, italic or fixed-width, you can use the HTML <b>, <i> and code tags. For example: 

<b> bold </b>, 
<i> italic </i>,
<b> <i> bold+italic </i> </b>.

Note that MediaWiki (like most Wikis) processes pages line-by-line, so if you want three bold lines of text, you will need to use three separate <b>...</b> tags. Also note that unclosed or unmatched tags are not removed from the page.

MediaWiki also implements the old "quote style" of text formatting, which is used on several wikis. Briefly: 

''Two single quotes are italics'',
'''three single quotes are bold''',
'''''five single quotes are bold and italic.'''''

looks like:

Two single quotes are italics, three single quotes are bold, five single quotes are bold and italic.

Headings

Headings are delimited by 1-6 equal signs (=). They basically correspond to HTML's <h1> through <h6> tags. 

= Headline size 1 =
== Headline size 2 ==
=== Headline size 3 ===
==== Headline size 4 ====
===== Headline size 5 =====
====== Headline size 6 ======

Lists

Simple lists: 

* Text for a bulleted list item.
** Text for second-level list.
*** Text for third level, etc.

...which looks like:

  • Text for a bulleted list item.
    • Text for second-level list.
      • Text for third level, etc.

Numbered lists: 

# Text for a numbered list item.
## Text for second-level list.
### Text for third level, etc.
## Another Text for the second level.

...which looks like:

  1. Text for a numbered list item.
    1. Text for second-level list.
      1. Text for third level, etc.
    2. Another Text for the second level.

Indented Text

Simple indented text: 

: Text to be indented (quote-block)
:: Text indented more
::: Text indented to third level

...which looks like:

Text to be indented (quote-block)
Text indented more
Text indented to third level

Preformatted Text

Individual lines can be displayed as preformatted (fixed-width or "typewriter"-font) text by placing one or more spaces at the start of the line. Other wiki formatting (like links) will be applied to this kind of preformatted text.

Additionally, multi-line sections can be marked as pre-formatted text using lines starting with <pre> (to start pre-formatted text), and </pre> (to end preformatted text). The <pre> and </pre> tags are not displayed. Wiki links and other formatting is not done within a preformatted section. (If you want wiki formatting, use spaces at the start of the line instead of the <pre> and </pre> tags.)

For instance: 

Pre-formatted section here.  No other link
  or format processing
is done on pre-formatted sections.
For instance, [[Songs]] is not a link here.

and: 

  This is the starting-spaces version of
  preformatted text.  Note that links like
  Songs still work.


Retrieved from "http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/index.php/Basic_Wiki_Formatting"
Personal tools