Help:Contents

Important Information You will only be able to edit the content of this site if you have created an account and are logged in. There are a few things you ought to know before you start creating or editing articles in the knowledge base - Be aware that other users may decide to edit "your" material! Inappropriate content will be removed. The system tracks what changes were made, by whom and when.

Basic Editing If you follow a link for which no content has yet been created, you'll get a view like the one shown below - You'll get a similar view by selecting the "edit" tab on an existing page, except that current content will appear in the main edit window: The buttons allow you to format the page, while you type in the text in the main window below the buttons. The simplest way to create content is to type in the text first, then apply formatting afterwards. You can hit the "Show preview" button to get a quick look at how your page looks. Sometimes if there's only a small amount of content it's difficult to see the preview as it appears above the editing pane and can seem to get lost in amongst the clutter. Use the "Save page" button to commit your page to the server. You'll probably need to hit enter twice to make the text break onto a new line.

Format Buttons Working from Left to right, the buttons are Bold Italic Internal Page link (within the SJTAG Wiki) External Page link (to the Internet or non-Wiki parts of the SJTAG site) Heading Embedded Image (e.g. .JPG or .PNG files) Media File link (e.g. .AVI file) Mathematical Formula (not currently supported) Ignore Wiki Formatting (sometimes needed to allow some punctuation to show properly Insert signature Horizontal Line

Applying formatting If you know HTML you can insert HTML tags in your text. For most things you can just use the buttons, e.g. to make text bold, highlight it in the edit window then click on the Bold ("B") button. You'll get some strange quote marks round the text but that's OK. The same sort of thing applies to Italic and Heading formats. In most cases you can hit the button first and then edit the text between the "tags" as required, but it's easier to make mistakes that way. More on formatting Once you see how the markup "tags" get applied to your text, you'll realise how easy it is the add the tags yourself as you type. This means that you can apply nested headings or nested bullet points to your document. More on headings When you insert a heading using the heading button, the heading text gets wrapped by double equals symbols, like this == My Heading == This is a "level 1 heading" - A level 2 heading would have three equals symbols at each end, and a level 3 heading would have four equals symbols, etc. (Level 0 headings have only one equals symbol, but are usually reservered for the page title, and are rarely used in articles). If your page includes several headings, then a table of contents will be automatically generated for the page (similar to the one one you can on this page if you scroll up). More on punctuation Because the Wiki markup uses punctuation symbols like *, #, ', =, [ and ], you may find that some unexpected things happen when you preview your page. If this happens, then you will need to select the relevant symbols in your text and mark them with the "NoWiki" button. You may find it easier to mark a block of text this way, rather than individual symbols, if you do not need any other formatting within that block.

Links To create a link to a new page (which you will create later) then simply type the title of the new page into your text. Make sure it is capitalised as you want it to appear on the page heading, then select the title and click on the Internal Link ("Ab") button. Once you save the current page you can follow the link and create the content for the new page. If you want to link to an existing page, then you need to type in the title of the target page highlight the title and click on the Internal Link button For external links, simply type (or paste in) the URL of the target page, highlight and click on the external link button.

Pictures Images (and Media Files) need to be uploaded before they can be used in a page. If you try to reference an image before it has been uploaded, the page will fail to save. Pictures should preferably be GIF, JPG or PNG formats - BMP is not recognised. Once your images are uploaded, you can create the page text as normal. Type in the file name (with extension but no path) at the point you want the image to appear, highlight and click on the "Image" button.

Citations and References The "Cite" extension has been added to this Wiki, which allows reference annotations to be embedded in the articles with a corresponding list of reference notes appearing as footnotes. Rather than try to describe the usage here, please refer to the MediaWiki notes.

Bullets and Numbered Lists Entering a list of bullet points simply requires you to place a '*' as the first character of each list item. Make sure the '*' is at the leftmost position on the page! Nested bullets can be created by using '**', '***', etc., e.g. This code: * List item 1 ** Level 2 *** Level 3 * Back to level 1 Produces this output: List item 1 Level 2 Level 3 Back to level 1 In a similar way, numbered list can be created using the '#' symbol: This code: # List item 1 ## Level 2 ### Level 3 # Back to level 1 Produces this output: List item 1 Level 2 Level 3 Back to level 1

Templates Templates are a means of adding frequently used elements or formatting without typing the full markup each time. You can think of it as macro expansion. Typical uses are to mark a page that requires further editing or to limit the depth of the Table of Contents for a page. Templates appear in the editing window as the template name enclosed within double braces: {{TemplateName}}. New templates must be created in the Template namespace to be recognized, by adding the prefix "Template:" to the page name, e.g.: Template:MyTemplateName. The following Templates are presently available: {{Clear}} {{Protected}} {{Proposed}} {{TOClimit}} {{Tbd}} Template names are not case sensitive.

Further Reading You may find the following articles (from the English Wikipedia) to be helpful: Quick Guide Creating Links Using External Links Uploading Images