Editing China Wiki
Formatting Wikipedia articles is a bit different from writing on a standard word processor. Instead of a strict ("what you see is what you get") approach, Wikipedia uses text codes to create particular elements of the page (e.g. headings). This "language" is known as Wikitext (or Wiki-markup) and is designed for ease of editing.
Bold and italics The most commonly used wiki tags are bold and italics. Bolding and italicizing are done by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes ('):
You type You get italic italic bold bold
bold italic
bold italic
On Wikipedia, the names of an article's subject are written in bold when they are first mentioned in the article. For example, the article Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom begins:
Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor; born 21 April 1926) is Queen of sixteen sovereign states, holding each crown and title equally. Italics may be used for the names of books, movies, albums, and computer/video game titles. If the first mention of the subject of an article is also a book or movie title then bold italics is used.
For more information about when to use bold and italics, see Wikipedia:Manual of style.
Headings and subheadings Headings and subheadings are an easy way to improve the organization of an article. If you can see two or more distinct topics being discussed, you can break up the article by inserting a heading for each section.
Headings can be created like this:
You type You get
Heading
Heading
Subheading
Subheading
If an article has at least four headings, a table of contents will automatically be generated. Try creating a heading in this page's sandbox. It will be added automatically to the table of contents for the page, assuming three others already exist.
HTML HTML code can be used in pages to produce more advanced formatting such as colors, tables, and edit page layout. However, you do not need to know HTML to use Wikipedia and follow formatting conventions.
China Wiki links
Linking China Wiki articles together is very important. These easily created links allow users to access information related to the article they are reading and greatly add to China Wiki's utility.
When (not) to link Adding links to an article makes it more useful, but too many links can be distracting. This is why you should only link the first occurrence of a word.
Looking at other Wikipedia articles can also help you learn when to add links. See the featured articles page for a list of high quality articles.
How to link To make a link to another Wikipedia page (called a wiki link), put it in double square brackets, like this:
Sandbox = Sandbox
If you want to link to an article, but display some other text for the link, you can do so by adding the pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and other keyboards) followed by the alternative name. For example:
display text = display text You can make a link to a specific section of a page like so:
display text = display text If you want the display text of the link to appear in italics or bold, nest the double square brackets for the link within the multiple apostrophes that delimit the italicized or bold text, like this:
War and Peace = War and Peace Please check your links to ensure they point to the correct article. For example, Apple points to the article about the fruit, while Apple, Inc. is the title of the article about the computer manufacturer. There are also "disambiguation" pages - these are not articles, but pages which contain links to articles with similar titles. Some, such as Apple (disambiguation) are obvious, while others such as Georgia use generic titles. These differing titles make piped links especially useful, as a link to Georgia (country) is far less readable than a piped link called Georgia.
Categories You can also put the article in a category with others in a related topic. Just type [[Category:]], and put the name of the category between the colon and the brackets.
It is very important to put in the correct categories so that other people can easily find your work. The best way to find which categories to put in is to look at pages on similar subjects, and check which categories they use. For example if you write an article about a type of tree, you may look at an article on another type of tree to see which categories could be appropriate.
