Help talk:Editing/Archives/2006

Character formatting block

The version of this page which was on Wikipedia had a section on Character formatting. I always found that section very helpful. Even as a relatively experienced and long-term user, I still refer to it somewhat regularly. Since we are now copying this page over to Wikipedia rather than maintaining project-specific Help:Editing pages, that section has been lost. Please add it back. Rossami 16:59, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Transcluded files formatting issue

Have begun trancluding files that are used elsewhere rather than rewrite excellent pieces. They had been using level 2 headers and i have changed them to level 3 so they look better in the new setting. But they still show up as level 2 visually. Did i miss something ? Hillman 15:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Please link to the page concerned, so that people can see the problem.--Patrick 03:02, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, my problem went away. finger trouble with caching. thanks for your attention.Hillman 13:18, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Does WikiMedia contain a mechanism to conveniently display different views such as a cookie ?

I am trying to document two versions of a situation. These two versions are very similar but do contain some important differences. Is there a way of forcing a branch early between the two versions and then based on that choice displaying slightly different content ? I could of course build two complete structures with very similar content each containing its own specific differences. But from teh web world setting and then being able to test a cookie would have been my route. So i guess I am asking whether MetaWiki supports 'states' other than username ? Hillman 15:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

"Two versions of a situation" is rather vague. A template can handle different versions depending on a parameter (depending on a cookie I don't know).--Patrick 03:10, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Okay thanks for your attention. I am writing a piece of documentation for an application using a Wiki. The application exists on multiple platforms with relatively minor differences. Therefore it seems to me that I could (1) ask the user to choose platform and then display one of the 3 or 4 documentation trees (involves managing 3 or 4 trees with 80-90% content overlap), (2) ask the user to choose a platform and then using Wiki parameters display slightly different content (need to remember the platform choice somehow. Cookies ?), (3) write the documentation with lots of statements about platform applicability.

Option 2 seems the most user friendly and overhead reducing. But can I implement ? Hillman 13:32, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia'image or Media's

There must be a difference and also a preferred way to use an image. Why does this help page give two methods ?

• A link to Wikipedia's page for the image: Image:Wiki.png
• Or a link directly to the image itself: Media:Wiki.png

Also, I had to find an image in the french wiki, save it to my pc and upload it here ... what is the recommended method ? Thanks. --Harvestman 20:45, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Convert MSWord to Wiki

I have several word documents that contain math formulas and diagrams. What is the best way to post these to wiki? I could just upload them a binaries, but thats pretty stupid because then the keyword search won't work and people have to download them to view them. 66.44.148.95 17:44, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

reverting from diff pages

Right now, the article says, "However, the edit link of a diff page gives the current wikitext, even if the diff page shows an old version below the table of differences." But that's not true, is it? In my experience, the edit link gives the more recent of the two versions being compared. I'd change it, but I want to check here to see if there's something I'm missing. --Allen 01:57, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

rv rv Help:Reference_card

Moved to Help talk:Reference card (= the reason of the reverts) -- Omniplex (w:t) 11:31, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Including Help:Editing with New Installation

I'm new to MediaWiki software, I've just installed v1.6.6 on a private network. I noticed there was no Help:Editing data included with my wiki installation. Though I was able to transfer the information to my MediaWiki instance I felt it should have included the basics of how-to start editing & creating articles. I've looked through the dump files, but I did not see any obvious help related SQL dumps. Can this information be included easily into the next version? It would be great if this function was included during a new wiki install. Great software so far, keep it up!

There is a system admin section in the handbook help:contents SQL dumps don't have much to do with editing from my point of view... you are free to link as you like, and see if other people agree with you. There is a help:Editing page... I'm not sure how it didn't get to you. AaronPeterson 20:59, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Hier volgt een samenvatting van de vandaag ceconstateerde problemen mbt CenShare

Special Characters

What happened to the "Special Characters" section? Some other pages link to it, but it seems to have been moved/deleted.

There is a page Help:Special characters.--Patrick 16:50, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

How to add your photo to a wiki article

I would like to help others and to help myself by being able to write the article on How to add your photo to a wiki article. I can compress an image, and upload it, but at the moment that is as far as I can take it. This is for images from cameras which people are prepared to place in the public domain. I have read and tried but to no avail. The furthest I got was to create a link to my photo; it did not get imbedded in the article. I know the instructions are there somewhere, deep in the many pages of detail. I would like to have and write (or provoke the writing of) the BRIEF SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS for embedding a picture in a wiki article. Garrison Roo

In my Wiki, it's just: [[Image:imagename.jpg]] -douglas

Smap

I am unable to find the source of the smap that appeared on this page. How was that done? Did sb. edit a template? Why does it not show up when viewing the archived versions?

use of tags

MediaWiki_User's_Guide:_Editing_overview#The_wiki_markup suggests the use of small tags would be appriopriate when writing captions, however editors don't have to worry about the appearance of their captions as that's dealt with by the rendering engine.

Regarding "Help:Editing"

Chuck Marean:
Help:Editing page is a starter guide or editing overview for wiki newbies.

• Newbies have no knowledge about editing pages, not just wikitexts. We need to explain others too.
• We shouldn't just put a cheatsheet with so little explanation. A cheatsheet is unappropriate in that newbies cannot understand what the contents of a cheatsheet means. It's far too simple. To see if I'm correct, I asked one newbie (he hasn't edited any page at all) to read the cheasheet. He didn't get any clue about what the cheatsheet is saying. A cheatsheet may be okay for knowledged people who wish to have quick reference when they forget some wikitexts. You may open a new page with the cheatsheet in it.
• It appears a bit unappropriate to delete all previous work contributed by other people and just put a new one.

After all considerations, I decided to revert to the previous version first.
Your cheatsheet is temporarily stored at Help:Wikitext_reference.
Any further discussions are welcome!
--Wai Wai 12:38, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

I wasn't able to find the image at Meta. Maybe an article would be good. People could then take their own notes, and then the page would never be too wide in the browsers it's been too wide in.--Chuck Marean 23:30, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

---

I'm sorry to say that I did not find any of the latest changes made by Chuck to be an improvement for this help page:

• I vastly prefer a two-column table of examples over the short, no-explanation wikitext examples
• The "Editing Basics" section seems much clearer with review policy / start editing / type your changes / etc. split out, as in the earlier versions by Wai Wai and other. The extremely condensed version Chuck is advocating simply doesn't do it for me. Not only is it missing essential elements (telling newbies to check the talk pages is not wasted time!), but it lacks structure and is confusing.
• The table is much clearer to me if all the related exmples are grouped together. Putting each examples into its own cell only makes the page longer.
• The wikipedia cheatsheet is too condensed for newbies. And since we already have a table of examples, it's entirely redundant and just makes the page longer. It also messes with the formatting of the page on my (relatively narrow) browser window. Plus, I don't think putting a wikipedia-specific cheatsheet on a meta help page intended to be copied over to other wikis is such a good idea.

Overall, I would vote to revert all the changes Chuck has made lately - at least back to the version by Wai Wai on July 18. Patrikd 22:53, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

---

This page has been reverted again to another version. I couldn't find any explanation apart from "this page turns back into a wikitext reference!", which is highly inaccurate. The table just describes the most frequently used one. As agreed by Patrikd, I reverted back to my last version first. --Wai Wai 11:42, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

References

This is much better than the old Help page, but it needs to be made clearer, either here or by an obvious link, how we are supposed to properly refer to external information. Not technically--that's made clear--but procedurally.Calion 21:46, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I have a quick question

Is there a way using div or span tags to make text in allcaps? It's for a template over at http://uncyclopedia.org to use a {{PAGENAME}} in caps. --71.225.64.232 21:56, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

With uc: HELP TALK:EDITING/ARCHIVES/2006.--Patrick 23:13, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

I know this is late, but it can also be done with CSS:

<span style="text-transform: uppercase">{{FULLPAGENAME}}</span>

Help talk:Editing/Archives/2006

I agree that uc is better here, though. Superm401 | Talk 07:44, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Bug: Printing problems from Firefox on a Mac - this page

Using the most recent version of both Firefox 1.5 (1.5.0.7) and 2.0 (2.0rc2) I am unable to print this page (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing). I am also unable to print Wikitext examples (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext_examples).

The problem is just with Firefox on a Mac. I can print this page successfully using Safari (Mac of course) or Firefox on Windows (2.0rc2). Print preview in both versions of Mac Firefox also doesn't work. I don't know if the issue is caused by some funky code on these pages or with Firefox, but I'm letting you know and I'll let Mozilla know.

New tests: I can print from Opera (7.5.4 and 9), but not from Mozilla 1.7.12 and not from Camino 1.0 (both from Mozilla and presumably with the same code as Firefox).

I can print other meta.wikimedia.org pages from Firefox, including some pages with small tables, so the problem is with specific pages, not all wiki pages.

FYI: I'm using the most recent Mac OS (10.4.8).

Setting up links that open a new browser window

Is it possible to configure links in wikimedia that open the target url in a new browser window similar to the target="_blank" attribute in html?TedHopper 16:35, 3 November 2006 (UTC)TedHopper

More comfortable editing environment

Is it possible that someone writes a more comfortable editing environment? The "show preview" function works as it should, but a more WYSIWYG-situation would be very much appreciated, in particular to see, whether the internal links are correct. Also, a spell-checker would be good, i.e. all these useful functions every text software like Word or OpenOffice has. Thanks, Jakob 128.135.82.173

Error

This isn't semantically correct:

• • Start every line with a star.
    • More stars indicate a deeper level.

  Previous item continues.

The third item is a definition list inside of an unordered list. It is not the "previous item continued". — Omegatron 02:53, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

The technique can be used for the stated purpose, to continue an item. It works in my browser.--Patrick 09:28, 21 December 2006 (UTC)