Following are some of the most common operations you'll want to perform as you write wiki text.

See also

• wiki syntax - more detail about wiki markup
• wiki style guide - hints on how to write good wiki pages

Scroll to the bottom of an existing wiki page. At the bottom left, click on the button that says “Edit this page.” You will then see an editing window, with a row of buttons across the top that looks something like the following.

The most immediately useful of these button functions are explained below. Note that each button in your editing window also politely supplies its name in text if you hover your mouse over it. For further information, see also the full description of these quickbuttons. (If you don't see the buttons, that means your browser is not capable of, or is not allowing, the needed JavaScript.)

Start by editing an existing page, and create an internal link from there to a page with whatever new name you'd like. Save your changes, and now your old page shows your new link to a nonexistent page. Click on that link, then on the button to “Create this page.”

Feel free to use spaces in your page names, or either upper- or lowercase letters. The wiki will automatically save your names as lowercase, though, and it will replace all spaces with an underscore (“_”) character. So, for instance, if you create a page named “Bob Smith,” you'll see from the page title that the wiki renames it “bob_smith.” However, you can then link to that page using either name.

These buttons do pretty much exactly what you would expect: they insert tags that will render the specified styling, and you can then type into them the text that you would like to style.

If you prefer to use your keyboard instead of clicking on a button, the wikitext looks like this:

//italic//     **bold**     __underline__

No surprises in these buttons, either. Traditionally, the first-level header (h1) is reserved for the page's full title; it's a good idea to have a first-level header on each page, so your wiki is easy for everyone to navigate.

If you prefer to use your keyboard instead of clicking on a button, the wikitext looks like this:

====== h1 ======
===== h2 =====
==== h3 ====
=== h4 ===
== h5 ==

(Bonus points to computer geeks who notice that these go in the opposite direction from Wikipedia and other MediaWiki sites, where headers start at == h1 == and add equals signs.)

You can link from your wiki page either to another page in this wiki, or to anywhere else on the web.

Links to other pages in this wiki are called internal links. To create an internal link, click the plain link icon (it's trying to look like three links of a chain), then type the name of the destination page. If you're linking to pages inside your own school's wiki, the easiest way to get the page name for your link is from the big gray title at the top of the page – this page, for instance, is named “wiki:quick_reference.” If you'd like the text that appears in your link to be different from the page name, you can follow the page name with a “|” character and then the alternate display name.

Links that point elsewhere on the web are called external links. To create an external link, click on the link icon that shows a globe with the links. If you'd like the text that appears in your link to be the external address itself (starting with http://), use just that text. If you'd like the text that appears in your link to be different from the page address, you can follow the page name with a “|” character and then the alternate display name.

If you prefer to use your keyboard instead of clicking on a button, the wikitext looks like this:

 [[internal link]]
 [[internal link|Optional alternate display name]]
 [[http://example.com]]
 [[http://example.com|Optional name for link destination]]

Click on the media button to open a new browser window called “Media Files.” In the top right, click on the “Browse…” button to select the file from your computer that you would like to upload to the wiki. You may want to use the “Upload as” box to save the file with a new name on the wiki – this is very often a good idea, so that both you and other users at your school can later identify the file easily: “logo.png” or “staff-picnic-2007.jpg” is a much more useful name than “img0401.jpg”!

When you have chosen a good filename, click the “Upload” button, and your new uploaded file joins the list at the bottom right of the screen. This list contains all the available media files already uploaded in your current namespace. To insert your new uploaded file (or any other that is currently available), click on its name in this bottom right pane.

If you prefer to use your keyboard instead of clicking on a button, your file is already uploaded, and you know its filename, the wikitext looks like this:

{{wiki:filename.jpg}}
{{wiki:filename.jpg|Optional alternate filename, or image caption}}

If you would like to check your spelling against the wiki's installed dictionary, click on the spellcheck button. Each word in your text that the dictionary doesn't find will be display in red underline. Click on a word to select from the available alternatives, if desired.

When you are finished checking spelling, you must click on the spellcheck button again to return to editing mode, or you will not be able to save your edits to the page!

It is always a good idea to look at your edits before you publish them with the Save button! Click on the Preview button below the editing window to see what your text will look like. If your page is long, you may have to scroll far up to get back to the place where you were editing.

You will also notice that you now have two vertical scroll bars, one for the editing window itself and one for the whole wiki page with edits-plus-preview, and quite possibly a third for your entire browser window. If you have trouble navigating up and down a long page, check to see whether one of the other scroll bars will help you.

Once you are satisfied with your work, remember to Save it! (If you attempt to leave the page where you have been editing without saving your changes, your browser will ask whether you really want to abandon your work without saving it.)

Are you sure nobody anywhere is using it? Check first to see what links to this page. Unless this was a brand new or briefly experimental page, you might want to consider keeping the page where it is and replacing its content with a link to the new content.

If this is definitely your page and you're not creating any orphan pages or dead links when you take it away, the quick way to delete a page is to click on the “Edit this page” button, select all its content, delete it all, and click on the “Save” button.

Currently, the easiest way to move or rename a page is to create a new page in the new location, copy the old page source (use the Edit button to see it), and paste the page source into the new page. Notice that this process makes it easy to break any remaining links to the page, so proceed with caution.