Edit window

Offline MediaWiki Code Editor

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Edit Window

Window to edit, save and export pages of wikitext.

Panel of tools

The Edit window is the window designed to edit articles in wiki code. The wiki code used by his assistant is MediaWiki ⁽¹⁾which is the markup language used in the articles of Wikipedia and all the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The assistant allows you to edit articles in wikitext, so you do not have to know the markup rules of this language, nor have to type any code. So you can concentrate more in the content that in the markup rules.

The collection of MediaWiki markup rules is long. Like some other wiki languages MediaWiki also accept some elements of the HTML markup language.

This assistant makes use of a selection of the most important rules so you can edit articles with the standard styles used in Wikipedia including citations, columns, tables, images, galleries, graphs, magic words and the most common templates.

The Edit window is resizable to take advantage of the available space in the screen. It has a panel of buttons to help you during the process of edition.

Fonts	Monospace	Proportional
*Serif*	Courier New	Cambria Constantia Times New Roman
*Sans-serif*	Consolas	Arial Calibri Corbel

You can select the font type you prefer to display, among a menu of eight different fonts, covering all font families:

Zoom buttons allows to increase or decrease font size. Some other useful buttons are also available. The date of the last update is also displayed for information.

Toolbar

A toolbar is available at the left side of the Edit window and visible all the time. It contains several panels of buttons which make easier the process of edition.

Actions you can do once selected a string of text

Once you had selected a string of text there are a few frequent actions you can do with the help of these buttons:

· Internal links (see below ê)

· Copy (to clipboard)

· Cut (to clipboard)

· Bold

· Italics

· Superscript

· Subscript

· Counter of spaces (in the selected string)

· Erase

· Highlight

· Center (a template to center text in table cell)

· Text size ( Small:85% / Larger: 110% / Big:120%)

Internal links are links to other pages of Wikipedia, or to sections of the same, or other pages. Links to pages of Wikipedia in other languages (interlanguage links) are also considered internal links. The assistant lets you create and customize links. Those valid links will be showed in blue in the final page, but links to nonexisting pages will be shown in red to make clear that they do not link to anywhere. Those links should be eliminated or change by valid links.

Although links may be customized to show a different text, in some cases Wikipedia rename the links automatically:

1. The part of a title which is in parenthesis wil be automatically hidden. For example, a link to the article Seattle (Washington) will show the link text: Seattle.

2. The part of a title after a comma, will be automatically hidden. For example, a link to Seattle, Washington will show the link text: Seattle.

3. When the links include a namespace corresponding to some other project of the Wikimedia Foundation (like Wikiquote, Wikibooks or Wikctionary) those names are automatically hidden. For example, a link to Wikipedia:Village pump will be shown as Village pump.

4. Links to sections of the same page will not been displayed in blue in the browser, but only in bold type. In this kind of link the namespace is not hidden, nor the symbol '#' in the link text. To hide them you should enter an alternative text, Use always an alternative text for links pointing towards sections of the same page.

Actions you can do once selected a paragraph

Once you had selected a paragraph (or several paragraphs) there are a few frequent actions you can do with the help of these buttons:

· Heading level - Levels 2-4 (level1 is reserved to page titles only)

· Left identation

· Blockquote

· Bulleted list item

· Numbered list item

· Columns. Tools. to split the selected text in customizable columns.

Lists are created inserting the list elements one by one, not leaving any empty line among elements. Lists can be numbered or bulleted. In numbered lists is not necessary to enter numbers, because the Wikipedia motor assigns numbers automatically. In bulleted lists the elements are preceded by a bullet instead of a number.

The assistants for columns helps you to select: number of columns, width of each column, total-width of the block of columns and background color.

Actions you can do once you selected a point of insertion

Once you had selected a point of insertion in the Edit window there are other actions you can do with the help of these buttons:

· Paste from clipboard

· Force a line break. When you insert a line break using <Enter> key, this

is not interpreted as a line break to start a new paragraph. To produce

effective line breaks you must leave an empty line, So you can produce

effective line breaks typing the <Enter> key twice. But sometimes, in table

captions or in the middle of a paragraph you may need to force a line break.

This can be produced using the command button <BR>, which is equivalent

to the <br> HTML tag.

· Unbreakable space (to prevent separation of two words in different lines)

· External link. A external link is a link to an internet page which does not belong to any of the Wikimedia projects. Such links point to the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the destination page with the HTML scheme, that is, beginning the addresses with http:// or https:// which is the scheme accepted by all browsers.

· URL link. It formats the appearance of displayed URLs

· Gallery builder. This button opens a menu of techniques to display an image gallery.

· Single image. This button opens a menu of techniques to display a single image.

· Citations linked to the article. An assistant to build code for citations

· Tables builder. This button opens a menu of techniques to build tables

· Special characters. A list of >100 non ASCII characters you might display

· Repository of templates. Repository of the most frequently used templates in Wikipedia (more than 250 templates)

· Magic words. Features of wiki markup that give instructions to Wikipedia's underlying software

· Charts Charts of different kinds you can use to build those of your interest.

· Sign (only for talk pages, never in the article pages)

Single image. You can only insert images which had been previously uploaded to Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons. To insert images you do not need to include the URL or the image, but only its name (including the extension), once every image has a different name. You can not insert images located in other web sites. Although the sintax may be complex the assistant helps you to insert images even if you ignore the code. It is a common practice to include links in the image footnotes, force line breaks, insert non-breakable spaces or make modifications to the text format.

Citations linked to the article. Citations should be inserted into the text where these are needed to back up the given information. These are generally inserted at the end of a statement after the period, but these can be inserted in any part of the text. The abundant inclusion of citations makes the wikitext hard to read. But the interpreter of wikitext does not display citations in the point of insertion. It stores the citation and assigns it a consecutive ordinal number showing the link number in the point of insertion. To display the full content of the citation is mandatory to insert a section of References at the end of the article. The last can be done using the command button <Reflist>. It is common to display the references distributed in two columns.

Tables. The assistants for tables allows you to build wikicode for tables and insert it into the pages in ongoing edition. Although the code may be rather complex the assistants allows to create tables with a professional aspect even when you ignore the rules..

Templates. A template is a Wikipedia page created to be included in other pages and usually contain repetitive material that might need to show up on any number of articles or pages. Among other things, templates are used to add recurring messages to pages in a consistent way, to add boilerplate messages, and to create navigational boxes.When a template is automatically expanded and appears on a page, it is said to be "transcluded". The Repository of templates contains a collection of the most common templates used in Wikipedia and comprehensive documentation and examples of how to use those templates, so you can take advantage of them to edit your articles.

Magic words. Magic words (including parser functions, variables and behavior switches) are features of wiki markup that give instructions to Wikipedia's underlying MediaWiki software. For example, magic words can suppress or position the table of contents, disable indexing by external search engines, and produce output dynamically based on the current page or on user-defined conditional logic. Some of these features are especially useful for templates. This assistant offers the opportunity to use the most frequent magic words used in Wikipedia.

Graphs. The Assistant for graphs offers examples of how you can build and insert different types of charts into articles. You can build either line charts, area charts, bar charts or even pie charts using not any image, but only the {{Graph}} template.

Actions you can do at the end of the article

List of references. This section, if needed, is usually titled "Notes" or "References", and is placed at or near the bottom of the article. With some exceptions discussed below, citations appear in a single section containing only the {{Reflist}} template. For example:

== References ==

The footnotes will then automatically be listed under that section heading. Each numbered footnote marker in the text is a clickable link to the corresponding footnote, and each footnote contains a caret that links back to the corresponding point in the text.

Categories. Categories are intended to group together pages on similar subjects. They are implemented by a MediaWiki feature that adds any page with a text like [[Category:XYZ]] in its wikimarkup to the automated listing that is the category with name XYZ. Categories help readers to find, and navigate around, a subject area, to see pages sorted by title, and to thus find article relationships.

An article will often be in several categories. Be sure that the name of the category exists. Otherwise, the link to the category page will be displayed in red indicating that the category does not exist.

Insert categories one after another, in consecutive lines, not leaving empty lines.

Categories are normally found at the bottom of an article page. Clicking a category name brings up a category page listing the articles (or other pages) that have been added to that particular category. There may also be a section listing the subcategories of that category. The subcategorization feature makes it possible to organize categories into tree-like structures to aid navigation. In Wikipedia, it is customary to place category declarations at the end of the wikimarkup.

To insert categories offers some advantages:

1. The insertion of a category in an article creates automatically a link to the article in the Category page.

2. Categories make easier the navigation among Wikipedia pages, so the articles can be more easily localized in the encyclopedia.

Every article should have at least one category. Some articles classify in several categories at the same time. Before inserting a category at the end of an article be sure that the category exists. If the category does not exist it will produce an error.

The categories are inserted one by one in consecutive lines without leaving empty lines or in the same line separated by pipes (|). Those should be inserted at the end of the article after the list of references.

When you assign a category to an article, the alternative names of the article are not automatically assigned to the category. To include this alternative names it is required to insert the category also in the redirection pages.

⁽¹⁾ http://meta.wikimedia.o rg/wiki/Wikitext%20standard

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