User:Chiefbozx/HTNFAW

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chiefbozx
User pageMy talk page • Contributions • Templates • Contact me • Funny things I've said • How to not fail at wiki

Some common mistakes

Some common mistakes I see in wiki newbies are:

  • Command+B or Control+B don't do anything on the wiki. To make stuff bold you have to use three apostrophes on either side of the text.
  • Similarly, Command+I or Control+I doesn't make stuff italic. Use two apostrophes instead.
  • Two apostrophes and a quote mark are different. One (quotes) is used to indicate what someone is saying (Frumple declared "Tacos are the best food ever"), the other (two apostrophes) is used to make text italics. They do look similar in sans serif font.
  • Complaining about the lack of WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor? MediaWiki was designed around code. Text is formatted in code.
  • MediaWiki language is different from Wikispaces language.
  • To make stuff underlined or struck through you have to use html tags, namely, <u></u> for underline and <s></s> for strikethrough.
  • Use <nowiki> only when you're displaying text to the user. Don't use it in the middle of an article unless you know it should be there.
  • Minor edits are not to be used very much, only when correcting spelling and the like.
  • Similarly, spelling is not important. My favorite color may not be the same as Frumple's favourite colour, but we're talking about the same thing.
  • Indents are made with colons, not spaces.
  • Count your apostrophes. Three for bold text and two for italic text. For both, 3 + 2 = 5, so five apostrophes give both. Make sure you start/end with the same number of apostrophes: '''Text'' becomes 'Text which is italicized instead of emboldened.

Don't copy from Wikispaces

Some of you may be inclined to copy and paste from Wikispaces, and here's why it's a bad idea:

Wikispaces formats text and puts a space at the beginning of each line, and it has line breaks in the middle of everything. This does not flow naturally when read on the page so you need to remove it.

If you do not remove the preceding space, you get a block of preformatted text as if you were trying to explain code.
This is not typically used in articles.
But it looks nice for explaining template syntax, like {{notice}}.

In addition, line breaks in the middle of an article are interpreted as spaces by the software, but please make our lives easier by removing them.