Help:Wiki editor's reference

This page contains references to resources for advanced users.

Wikitext
Wikipedia's Cheatsheet contains basic formatting commands. Content is more important than format. If you run into difficulty, please continue to edit and ask for help later. The editing toolbar will display help text when you hover the cursor over an icon.

Color
You can use  for tables.
 * Foreground color:  will display as text
 * Background color:  will display as text

MediaWiki understands color names as well as the hex codes. For example, you can use  instead of.
 * Web colors, from Wikipedia.
 * phpBB's [Tool online style editor (100+ styles)]
 * Tango Icon Theme Guidelines (deprecated, use phpBB theme)

Formatting text
Some text formats use HTML elements, for example bold, underline , superscript , and subscript. These tags work even if raw HTML is disabled (see below).

For more, see: Help:HTML in wikitext.

Images

 * Help:Images from MediaWiki, for help on how to size and frame images.
 * Force text to relocate after an image:  (Help:Images from MediaWiki).

Interwiki links
Interwiki links are links to pages of other wikis, using the wiki's built-in internal link style. There are quite a number of existing links already available, such as Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and Wikinews. For a short list, please see Manual:Interwiki (entered as ).


 * links to ETF. You can reformat this to show as  (produces "ETF") - very useful in context.
 * creates a Google search for "investing": investing.
 * links to Jack Bogle

The Bogleheads' wiki is also customized to provide an interwiki link to our sister Canadian wiki, finiki. For example,  links to RRSP.

Links
You can use a bare protocol -- that is, without the https: or http: -- so that  displays as [//www.bogleheads.org/forum Bogleheads forum].

Math
See Math formulas in the wiki.

Parameters, parsing

 * Help:Magic words, from MediaWiki.
 * Help:Extension:ParserFunctions, from MediaWiki. How to process parameters passed to templates.

Tables

 * The basics: Help:Tables, from MediaWiki.
 * Comprehensive: Help:Table, from Wikipedia. Lots of examples to do just about anything.
 * Use Excel2Wiki to create tables directly from a spreadsheet.

Templates

 * Help:Transclusion, from Wikipedia. The key to it all.
 * Help:Templates, from MediaWiki. A simple example to get started.
 * Help:Template, from MetaWiki. Covers parameters, substitution, parsing
 * Wikipedia:Substitution, from Wikipedia. How it works, when you should use it, (more importantly) when you should not use it.
 * Help:Advanced templates, from MetaWiki. Parameter passing.

Mobile
Displaying wiki pages on mobile devices forces a number of compromises due to the small screen size.
 * Recommendations for mobile friendly articles on Wikimedia wikis, from MediaWiki.

HTML

 * Html element, attributes, such as,  ,  , and   and.
 * Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) Specification, reference W3C) for many HTML items.
 * List of XML and HTML character entity references, from Wikipedia.
 * Want to know how to generate a non-break space, &#x00B1; &lt; &gt; &lambda; and about 252 more? Use this reference.
 * Web building tutorials, from W3Schools.
 * Tutorials with lots of examples to practice on live. HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, ASP, SQL, and more.

Raw HTML
Using  in content pages poses a security risk. Because of this, only wiki administrators may create or edit templates containing HTML.


 * Embed Google Drive spreadsheets with Widget:Google Spreadsheet
 * Embed YouTube videos with Widget:YouTube
 * Embed Vimeo videos with Widget:Vimeo

Admin

 * MediaWiki version information
 * MediaWiki:Common.js
 * MediaWiki:Common.css
 * MediaWiki:Sidebar
 * Manual:Interface/Sidebar, from WikiMedia.

Namespaces
See: Wikipedia:Namespace, from Wikipedia.

Page cache (refreshing)
Sometimes, the MediaWiki engine may fail to rebuild a page. The result is that the change appears to have no effect, despite the user reloading the page from their browser. For example, a new image is uploaded, but the new image or the page linking to that image does not show the new version.

Updating a Google widget such as Widget:Google Document may also result in this problem. See: Extension:Widgets#Troubleshooting, from MediaWiki.

In either case, the user needs to force a cache purge by appending  to the browser's link. See: Manual:Purge from MediaWiki.

For example, you can purge the cache of this page using.

Special pages

 * Special:Version, shows installed MediaWiki software and extensions.
 * Special:ExpandTemplates, shows how templates and other wikitext expand to HTML.
 * Help:Special page, from Wikipedia. General help on Special pages.

Special:Allpages
Special:Allpages displays all categories starting with a character or phrase.
 * will display all categories starting with Main Page and go to the end
 * will display all categories starting with V and go to the end
 * will display all categories starting with W and go to the end

Widgets
A selection of Google Widgets is available:
 * Google Spreadsheet - for embedding spreadsheets
 * Google Document - for embedding documents
 * Google Form - for embedding spreadsheet forms
 * Google Presentation - for embedding presentations

Portals
Design guidelines used to create the former Main Page portal.
 * Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines, from Wikipedia.

Wikipedia portal listings

 * Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Contents/Portals
 * Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Featured portals

Main page candidates
The Main Page was based on a mixture of these portals:
 * Wikipedia:Portal:Business
 * Wikipedia:Portal:Mathematics
 * Wikipedia:Portal:Architecture