Help:Formatting

So you would like to write content for our wiki? Well, thank you! You may find the following helpful for making your page look nice.

One general piece of advice in advance: frequent use of the "Show preview" button will make it all much easier.

Basic Text Effects

These are determined by apostrophes:

'''bold''' = bold
''italics'' = italics

Paragraphs & Headlines

Sometimes you may find yourself wondering why something you have typed

like
this

actually appears on the final page

likethis.

This happens because MediaWiki ignores single line breaks and will only start a new paragraph after a blank line or a special element like a headline.

To force a line break, you can use the <br> HTML tag. For example, this<br>and this or

this<br>
and this

will both look like this
and this.

The <br> tag also takes the arguments clear=all, clear=left or clear=right which can be used to prevent text flow around an image.

Headlines exist in various sizes, or "levels", and are defined by adding equal signs on either side of your target text:

= 1st Level Headline =
== 2nd Level Headline ==
=== 3rd Level Headline ===
==== 4th Level Headline ====

You'll use 2nd level headlines to separate chapters with different topics and 3rd or 4th level headlines for finer differentiation. The only 1st level headline on a page should be the page title which is formatted automatically.

Whenever there are more than three headlines on a page (this one is a 3rd level headline by the way), a table of contents is automatically generated above your first headline. As you probably know from Wikipedia, it's a good idea to have a short sentence or two before the table of contents so the reader knows what the page is about - simply type this introduction as plain text without a headline, the page title will be its (1st level) headline.

CApiTALIzAtioN

As a general style guide, all words except articles and prepositions should be capitalized in headlines and page titles. Of course there are various other capitalization schemes, this one is the widely used "Chicago Style" and it was picked in the very early days of this wiki.

The First and Last Word Are Always Capitalized (But Please Keep Your Headlines a Bit Shorter than This)

Lists

A list is created when you start a couple of lines with *asterisks (and :colons) and could look a bit like this:

*1st item
*2nd item
:*2.1st item

1st item
2nd item

2.1st item

Links

You may want to use internal or external links to guide your reader to useful information elsewhere on this wiki or the web - please do so! There are buttons for easy addition of the "[[]]" or "[]" to any highlighted text, but since website links tend to disrupt the text they are part of, an alternate text should be used.

Examples

[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki ALT TEXT]

creates this external link: ALT TEXT

[[Main Page|ALT TEXT]]

creates this internal link: ALT TEXT

[[Category:3D Printing]]

does not appear in your text, but rather adds your page to that category

[[:Category:3D Printing]]

creates a "normal" internal link: Category:3D Printing

Templates

Templates can be used to easily fill predefined structures with content.

Inspiration from Other Pages

Copying the structure of an existing page can make your work much easier! Just remember to view the source when you want to copy something or you will not get anything but plain text.

Commenting

Everything between  tags will only be visible in a page's source, not the regular reading version. You may want to use this feature to leave notes to yourself or other editors, or to hide an unfinished section!

Another way - with a higher chance of your comments actually being read by others - is using a page's "Talk" function.