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.

What are all these weird things in the transcript? (Doesn't fit with the naming convention)

What are you on about? Oh! The &#quot; ' and so on. HTML does its job by parsing tags. The problem is, these tags are denoted by characters that you might want to use legitimately (such as a single apostrophe, or quotation marks). The correct way to do this, in plain HTML is to use escape codes, which your browser parses into the characters you know and love. Wikipedia has the whole lot of escape codes for all the characters your heart desires.

However, this is not the 90s anymore. Computers have advanced and are sufficiently clever at recognizing what are HTML tags, and when you are just trying to use characters for effect. And, MediaWiki is intelligent enough to parse these into the escape codes for you. So please, do us all a favor and write your quotes and apostrophes normally (unless you want the curly kind) and save us all from wondering what you're trying to do.

...Do those special hyphens/dashes/separators?

They are special forms of punctuation, all part of the Dash family. We call these specific ones the em-dash and the en-dash. Educate yourself on the their use, come back here, and never use two dashes (--) when you mean an em-dash again, you dirty, unwashed heathen.

To use them you will need to use the escape codes that are talked about in the section above What are all these weird things in the transcript?.

...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.