This short page is written to help you quickly edit or create your pages on this site. Another good way to learn how is to look at other pages and click "edit this page" to examine the 'code'. The whole syntax story is on the Formatting Syntax.

Feel free to edit this page, or to play around in creating new pages. If you edit this page, either add new material at the end, or make improvements to the content already here.

Or, to just experiment, go to the PlayGround

Start by clicking on “Edit this page” (first read what follows)

• You will see a text box with the current content of the page, along with Wiki syntax in text form.
• You will also see syntax buttons above the text box. You can use these buttons to change format, or you can type keyboard commands. The easiest way to learn the keyboard commands is to see what they look like in editing mode. A link at the top of the page in editing mode will take you to a fuller explanation of Wiki syntax
• Buttons at the bottom of the text box will allow you to Save, Preview, or Cancel your changes.
• Important: the "Edit summary box" is where you write a statement saying what key changes you made.

Creating a new page is a little counter-intuitive. First, once in editing mode, highlight a word, then make it a link by selecting it. The word within the double brackets will be the name of the linked file.

The next step is to Save the page and then try to activate the link. An error message will tell you the linked page doesn’t exist, but you will see a button that says “Create this page.” Then you’re home free.

Wiki files are grouped into "namespaces," which are roughly akin to file folders.

• To link to a page in another namespace, the text inside the double brackets should be "namespace:filename".

• You can learn about namespaces by going to namespaces

• Use single words all lowercase (e.g., "wikipractice")
• Try to make the name intuitive
• There is a way to make a different word from the filename appear as a link in the text. Within the double brackets, and after the filename, you type the "|" character, then the word you want to appear in the text.

You can find a lot more information about making and modifying Wiki pages by going to pages in the wiki (see Index)

Make new changes below, or go to the playground

Buttons:

• The buttons at the top of the edit window will insert formatting syntax for bold, italic, underline, tt, strikethrough, Heading 1-5, links, lists, etc.
• hover your mouse cursor over each button to see a description of it.
• highlight the text you want to format, and click the button.

Sectioning: is used to organize any page/document as an outline.

• You should start a page with the H1 button and type your title in it ====== Level 1 Headline ======
• Start topic sections wit H2 button ===== Level 2 Headline =====
• see sectioning in the long syntax pag

To Start a new page: You create a new page by editing an existing page, inserting a new link with the name of your new page, save, then follow that new link. Find a page with links that would be appropriate to include a link to your new page.

About Links:

• links are the cornerstone of this type of site. Use cross links where ever you can.
• links to the web - can simply paste the whole URL starting with http:// =⇒ http://nsf.gov
• link to the wiki - [[topic:page]] see linky_linky
• link within the same page - [[#section title]]
• images
  • click the 'mountain picture' button upload the image (upload)
  • insert the image tag (done automatically)
  • to make them fancy, see Formatting Syntax
• stuff cut and paste from elsewhere that you don't want formatted: surround with <file>...stuff from a file...</file>, which will offset it but won't mangle it much.