Help:Editing

From the ALSA wiki

This page describes some of the basic wiki markup when editing pages. Please go to the sandbox page for a place to try things out. This wiki, and wikis in general, uses a simple text markup to achieve the same ends as html. The goal is for editing to be as easy as possible while still allowing descriptive markup. Those familiar with html will probably pick up the wiki markup more quickly. Often the easiest way to learn wiki markup is to find a page that uses a particular markup and then to edit that page to see the wiki markup used.

Links

Links may be made to other pages in the encyclopedia by enclosing the name in double brackets. Page names are case sensitive other than the first letter which is always capitalized but may be written either way. To use the plural of a page name, follow the closing double brackets with an "s". Links may be abbreviated using the pipe notation. External links are made by enclosing the url and name in single brackets.

Lists

Bulleted and numbered lists are made by preceding each item with a "*" or a "#" for bullets or numbers respectively. Definition lists are made by preceding the term with a semicolon and following with a colon and the definition. The asterisk, octathorpe, or semicolon must be the first character in the line.

Text Styles

Text may be emphasized and styled in a number of different ways. Various numbers of single quotes lead to three different levels of emphasis.

# cat ~/.asoundrc:
pcm.dsp0 {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "hw:0"
}

Categories

Category pages are a useful way to create indexes of related articles in the wiki. As an example, a new category for soundcards would be created by typing "Category:Soundcard" in the search box and then clicking on the "this exact title" link to edit the new index page. It does not technically matter what text appears on the index page but it should be a description of what is being indexed. For the example, something like "This page contains an alphabetical listing of articles about specific soundcards that are discussed in the wiki." After making the edit, click the "Save page" button to create the index page.

After the index page is created, articles can be added to the index by including the line

[[Category:Soundcard]] 

on a particular page (for example, on an "Ensoniq 1370" page). The wiki database will automatically add that article to the alphabetical listing on the index page (although this may take a minute or two to happen). It doesn't matter where on the page the "[[Category:Soundcard]]" appears; but to simplify the task of maintenance for the administrators, it should be the last line(s) on the page. A page can belong to more than one category: for example, it might belong to both a "Category:USB hardware" and "Category:Soundcard".

One final thing to know about Category pages is how to link to them; since the normal link wikicode ([[Category:Soundcard]]) can not be used (that would just add the page to the index). In order to link to the index page, use the syntax [[:Category:Soundcard]] (note the initial colon).

For example, "[[:Category:Howto]]" would result in the link Category:Howto. Piping can be used to alter how the link is presented (just like other wiki links): "[[:Category:Howto|Index of Howtos]]" would appear as Index of Howtos.

Sections

Many longer pages are divided up into logical sections. Each section may be linked to individually by appending a "#" and the section name in the link. For example, [[Help:Editing#Sections]] will link to this section. Sections come in different levels from level one, which is reserved for the automatically generated page title, to level six. Rarely will a page require more than about three levels. Section are made by surrounding the heading text with equal signs (=). Double equal signs denote a section, triple equal signs a sub-section, and so on. The first equal sign must be at the start of a line. A table of contents is automatically generated for pages with enough sections.

See also

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction_2 - Good introduction into editing
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents - Detailed information about the wiki syntax