Help:Wiki editing tips

This is a page to document Wiki editing tips and questions about editing the Wiki.

If you discover something about editing the Wiki that you think might be useful to others, jot it down here. Maybe it's already documented somewhere else; so what? If you didn't find it, maybe it's too hard to find, and we should make it easier.

If you're wondering about how to do something, or why something is done a certain way, add it to the Questions section. If you find the answer, document it. Maybe someone else will have the same question.

Another benefit: adding your tip or question here gives you more practice editing a Wiki page!

Check ISBN
I learned that I should check ISBN numbers by clicking on them in the references section, then use the Wiki Book sources page, to make sure I get a hit on Amazon, for example. I had never thought to do this before, and consequently had entered ISBN numbers that don't get hits. For example, there's a different ISBN in one of my books for ordering, and that's the one that gets the hit on Amazon.

This also ensures that your ISBN is valid, since Book sources will warn you if it is not.

Formatting references (citations)
To quickly format a citation, especially of a type you haven't done before, edit a Wikipedia article, e.g., Referencing for beginners, select Cite from the toolbar, pick the appropriate template, fill it in, preview, then click preview, then "show parsed preview" (can't copy/paste the preview because we don't support the cite templates), copy/paste the parsed preview into your article, do the additional required formatting (e.g., add italics for title), then enclose in ref tags.

I would say edit Wikipedia Sandbox, but sometimes I don't see Cite on the toolbar when I edit Sandbox. Plus, if you're new to referencing, it doesn't hurt to take a look at the Referencing for Beginners article when doing this.

Incidentally, the Referencing for Beginners article was very helpful to me, but of course we don't have the Cite tool or the templates so some of it is irrelevant, but nevertheless, it has been useful to me.

Why?

 * Why do we use second level headers for main sections instead of first-level?
 * Answer: From Wikipedia Help:Section: Please do not use only one equals sign on a side (=Heading=). This would cause a section heading to be as large as the page's name (title). The maximum number of equals signs is six.


 * Why would one use Gallery instead of file:...?