User:Lcarsos/Style Guide

Welcome new editor! This page is to help you grok how to be professional when editing a wiki. Since we use Mediawiki's wiki software, a link to Mediawiki's formatting guide, Wikipedia's Formatting Cheatsheet, and their Editing Guidelines page should help, they are a bit wordy though.

How Do I...

...Link to another page on the wiki?

Links to pages on this wiki are created with double brackets (these guys: [[ and ]] ). So, if you wanted to link to a great comic, like 1110: Click and Drag, you'd simply type [[1110: Click and Drag]]. If you want to be a cool guy and work it into a sentence like, "I just read this awesome comic, you should too!" you simply use a pipe ( | ) and then what you want the text to be something like [[1110: Click and Drag|this awesome comic]].

Typing out the whole name gets annoying and cumbersome sometimes. So, a lot of pages have redirect pages. For example, all comic explanations have a number redirect (1110) and a title redirect (Click and Drag). Now, somewhat unfortunately, we've turned to caps sensitivity for page titles. So a link to [[Click and Drag]] and [[click and drag]] are different, see: Click and Drag, and click and drag. This was done because the mediawiki software automatically capitalizes the first character of page titles, so comics like s/keyboard/leopard/ would usually have their titles mangled, with caps sensitivity it isn't.

...Link to another page on the Internet?

There's three ways to do this. If you want the whole URL to show up on the page, then just paste it in, like so: http://www.eff.org/ creates http://www.eff.org/. (As you can see, Mediawiki properly parses having periods after a URL, so don't be afraid to properly end your sentences) Method two is if you want to use the link as a citation, enclose it in single brackets. It will show up as a numerical citation, see: [http://www.eff.org/] ends up as [1]. The final way, using a space after the URL allows you to customize the text of the link: [http://www.eff.org/ a great legal resource] is parsed into a great legal resource.

Now, links to different types of documents will result in links with different thumbnails after them, to illustrate what type of document the link goes to.

• http://www.eff.org/ - a link to a regular, non-secure webpage.
• https://www.eff.org/ - a link to a secure webpage.
• https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/us_v_fricosu/gov_reply.pdf - a link to a pdf document
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Links#External_link_icons has a full list of the defaults
• http://www.xkcd.com/ - links to the xkcd.com domain have a customized thumbnail (which currently doesn't show up correctly, due to an on-going image resizing issue).

...Link to Wikipedia?

Since it is impossible to explain everything down to the smallest detail, sometimes we just have to allow Wikipedia to do the secondary explaining for us. Anything directly related to the comic, should be explained on the page, as well as providing a link to wikipedia. "But how?" you ask. An excellent question. For this wiki, you use the {{w}} template. Usage goes like this: {{w|Electronic Frontier Foundation}} produces Electronic Frontier Foundation. Note the braces (some people call them curly braces).

Similar to intra-wiki links, using a pipe allows you to change the text of the link. So, {{w|Electronic Frontier Foundation|EFF}} becomes EFF.

According to the Mediawiki links reference, the canonical method to link to another wiki is to register it with the database, and then it can be linked to by [[wikipedia:Electronic Frontier Foundation]] which produces wikipedia:Electronic Frontier Foundation, but to hide the "wikipedia:" you'd have to use a pipe so [[wikipedia:Electronic Frontier Foundation|Electronic Frontier Foundation]] would be Electronic Frontier Foundation. But, this is too much typing, use the {{w}} template, saving keystrokes saves time, which means you have more time to do something useful.

Thanks to Cos we also now have the {{Wiktionary}} template. Usage is the same as the {{w}} template.

...Make a Wikitable

Wikitable format

When Should I...

...Use a Bullet List?

For a simple list. Like a grocery list.

• Eggs
• Milk
• Salad

...Use a wikitable?

In the event that there is a list of items, but there is a lot of information about each item in that list, 1110: Click and Drag is a good example of when tables are useful.