Editing Quickstart Guide

This page exists to get new wiki contributors up and running quickly.

Introduction
When you click on the edit tab, you will see the "markup language" for the page, which is the text of the page, with special punctuation to indicate formatting, links and other special features. To change a page, just re-write or add material in the edit box that appears, and press the "Save Page" button at the bottom.

There are three main categories of markup you need to know in order to start adding useful content to a page:
 * 1) basic formating, including sections
 * 2) adding links to other pages and external web sites
 * 3) uploading files

For more advanced topics, like creating tables, see the online help or Table Examples.

Note that you can also choose to use the formatting buttons at the top of the edit window, which will insert some sample text into the edit window, which you can change.

Basic formatting
Here are some very basic MediaWiki formatting helps:

Adding Links
To make a word or phrase into an internal link, use two square brackets around the word(s). Use a pipe if you wish to show different cover text for the link.

To link to external material, just put the URL in the page source. To use different cover text, put a space between the URL and the covert text, and enclose in single brackets.

Here are some examples:

Uploading files
To upload a file, click on the "Upload file" link in the toolbox in the left sidebar. Then enter the filename to upload and click submit.

Files uploaded can be presented in 3 ways to the user:
 * 1) an image can be inlined on the page.
 * 2) a page describing the file can be displayed
 * 3) a link can be provided to directly download the file to a client's computer

To inline an image, use the syntax:   If the image is clicked on, then the description page will be shown. To present a direct-download link, use the syntax:  [[Media:filename.ext]] 

For files with a well-known type, use a template to show an icon for the file type. Here is an example using the PDF template: