Help:Editing

Editor's Handbook

A guided path — read the sections in order

Start here

1. Contributor's guide
2. Introduction
3. Be bold
4. Editing basics

Style & layout

5. Manual of Style
6. Guide to layout
7. Naming conventions
8. Namespaces
9. Citing sources

Building content

10. Peerage page
11. Award page
12. Ship page
13. Echelon page
14. Documenting an order
15. Posting news

Templates

16. Template guide

Deep dives

17. Styling & theme
18. Infoboxes
19. Navboxes
20. Dynamic lists (DPL)
21. Supersession
22. Categories

This page covers the basics of editing a page: the simple text codes you type to make links, headings, lists, and more. Once you have these, see the Contributor's guide for how to build specific kinds of articles.

How to edit a page

Every page has an Edit tab at the top. You need to be logged in to see it.

1. Click Edit.
2. Change the text in the box.
3. Write a short summary of what you changed.
4. Click Show preview to check your work.
5. Click Save changes.

Tip
Always fill in the edit summary. It tells other editors what you changed, and it shows up in the page history next to your edit.

The markup you will use most

Wiki markup is plain text with a few special characters. These are the ones you need day to day.

Bold and italic

You type	You get
'''bold'''	bold
''italic''	italic

Links

From Wikimedia:

There are five types* of hypertext links in MediaWiki:

1. Internal links to other pages in the same wiki (commonly called "wikilinks")
2. External links to pages at other websites
3. External links to internal pages in the same wiki
4. Interwiki links to other websites using special prefixes registered in advance
5. Interlanguage links to other wikis registered as different language versions of the current wiki

* list does not include category links and file links, which are used to place pages into categories and display images or other media files, respectively.

For the purposes of this wiki, these few examples should get your through most of your editing:

You type	What it does
[[HMS Medusa (SD-316)]]	Links to another page on this wiki.
[[HMS Medusa (SD-316)|the flagship]]	The same link, showing different words.
[https://forums.trmn.org Forums]	Links to an outside website.

Note
A red link means the page does not exist yet. That is not a mistake; it is an invitation to create it. A blue link means the page is already there.

For more complex linking, and some nity-gritty technical details, MediaWiki's detailed lists of the various linking methods provide everything you'll need beyond the list above.

Headings and sections

Wrap a heading in equals signs. Two for a main section, three for a sub-section:

==Main section==
===Sub-section===

The software builds the table of contents from your headings, so you never make one by hand.

Lists

* a bullet point
* another bullet point

# a numbered item
# the next number

References (citations)

To add a source, wrap it in <ref>...</ref> right after the fact, then put {{reflist}} in a References section at the foot of the page:

The barony was created in 2018.<ref>[https://forums.trmn.org/... announcement]</ref>

==References==
{{reflist}}

Tables

Tables start with {| and end with |}. This is the fiddliest markup, so the easiest way to make one is to copy a table from a similar page and change the contents:

{| class="wikitable"
! Column one !! Column two
|-
| a cell || another cell
|}

Adding an image

First upload the file with Special:Upload, then place it with [[File:Yourfile.png|200px]].

Before you upload
Make sure the image is under 12.5 megapixels. Above that size the wiki cannot build a thumbnail, and the page shows an "Error creating thumbnail" message instead of the picture. Resize large images first.

Where to go next

• Manual of Style, the rules for how articles should look and read.
• Template guide, the toolbox of ready-made templates.
• Contributor's guide, the full starting path.