Help On Editing

Now, you're probably at this page because, like me, you're a bit lost and not sure how to edit stuff on the DruidWiki.

Wikis are a bit special, in that they use some special things to make your text look different.

Headings

To separate out your article, you can make use of headings. Like styles in a word processor, a heading is a little bit of text that appears bolder than the rest. It also splits the article up into sections, so you can have a groovy little menu at the top. Headings range in importance from 1 to 5. So the broadest headings in your article (maybe even the title itself) will be a Heading 1, whereas the tiny nitpicky subsections might be 4 or 5.

To make a heading, you use the equals sign, or the = sign, and you place them around your heading text, like this:

=My Heading Here=

That would make a top level, or a Heading 1.

If you want to use a less bold heading type, you just add equals signs. The amount of equals signs either side of your text denotes what level heading you'll have. Like this:

=Heading 1=
==Heading 2==
===Heading 3===

and so on.

Emphasis

Firstly, to make your text change in emphasis, you can use the buttons at the top of the editor. You can also use sets of single quotes, or apostrophes to change your text thus:

''two quotes'';

will turn your text italic;
'''three quotes''';

will turn your text bold;
'''''five quotes (that's like 2 + 3)''''';

will make your text bold and italic;

any more than that, and it gets a bit complicated ;-)

So, to repeat. You can place your text inside the correct amount of quote marks, to get these effects to happen. (That's the apostrophe, the thing that looks like this: ' )

Lists

When making a list, the process is surprisingly intuitive. Basically, you indent your text a space in from the edge of your page, and you use stars (that's the *) for bullet points, numbers followed by fullstops (like 1.), for numbered lists, letters followed by fullstops (a.), for lettered lists.. and so on.

So this:

* my list
* has bullets

comes out like this:

• my list
  

• has bullets

and this:

1. my list
2. has numbers

comes out like this:

1. my list
   

2. has numbers

easy, no? ;-)

Links

Linking is what makes a wiki extra-special, so to help, the wiki has some extra-special ways of making them work.

Whenever you're linking, you use the square brackets. If you place text inside square brackets, the wiki will attempt to link to the relevant pages. The page you're linking to doesn't have to exist. If you link to a nonexistent page, the wiki will just display a New Page template when someone clicks on it. If the page does exist, it's probably best to try to get the name of the page right ;-)

To link, then, you do it this way:

["magpie"]

Will give you a link like this:

magpie

Easy!

If the page in question is particularly unwieldy or long, then no problem! You just add a label to make it work. Like this:

["Willen Lake/Medicine Wheel" Medicine Wheel]

Which will look like this:

Medicine Wheel

If you stick a URL inside your square brackets, the wiki will try to make an off-site link. Like this:

[http://www.druidnetwork.org]

Which looks like this:

http://www.druidnetwork.org

And finally, you can add a label.

[http://www.druidnetwork.org TDN]

Looks like this:

TDN

Whew! That was a long section!

Now, hopefully, editing on the wiki will make some sense!