Help:Contents

Getting Started

Getting started is very easy. When you know how. The reason that this page exists is because its not clear how to do these things.

How do I edit a page?

To edit a page, simply click the edit tab at the top of the page. A form will appear, containing the existing markup. When you have finished making modifications, click the Save button to commit your changes. [edit]

How do I create a new page?

There are several ways to create a new page:

   * Create a link to the page on another page, then click on the red link which appears
   * Browse to the intended location of the page, e.g. http://www.multidays.com/multidaywiki/index.php?title=new_page&action=edit and click on the edit link

On some wikis, a failed search for a page will contain a link which allows you to edit that page.

Wikilinks

A wikilink or internal link links a page to another page within the same project.

• [[a]] gives a.
• [[a|b]] gives b (link to a, labelled b).
• [[a]]b gives ab, just like [[a|ab]] does: ab.
• [[a|b]]c gives bc, just like [[a|bc]] does: bc.
• a[[b]] gives ab.
• [[a]]<nowiki>b</nowiki> gives ab.
• [[a]]''b'' gives ab.
• ''[[a]]''b gives ab.
• [[a|b]]c<nowiki>d</nowiki> gives bcd.
• [[a]][[b]] gives ab (two links, but looking equal to the single link ab), even if the links are underlined (a b and a b look the same only if links are not underlined).

Links with parameters (the link name) are said to be "piped" because of the pipe symbol used ( | ).

MediaWiki automatically checks if the target of a wikilink exists ("existence detection"). If the page doesn't exist, the link leads to the editing screen, and it is assigned the class "new". Such wikilinks are nicknamed "red links" because they are colored red in the default stylesheet on a default installation of MediaWiki. Red links are useful in determining the current status of the page (created or not created), create incoming links to a future page, facilitates and incites page creation.

Note that the image, category, and interlanguage syntax are the same as the wikilink syntax. Attempting to link normally will place the image on the page, add the page to the category and create an interlanguage link at the edge of the page. This can be prevented by prefixing a colon, which escapes the specific syntax. For example, [[:Category:Help]], [[:fr:Help:Link]], and [[:Image:Mediawiki.png]].

The existence of an internal link from a page to an existing or non-existing page is recorded in the pagelinks table.

How to Create External Links

External links use absolute URLs to link directly to any webpage. These links have the associated CSS class "external". External links are in the form link name (resulting in link name), with the link name separated from the URL by a space. Links without link names will be numbered: [1] becomes [1]. Links with no square brackets will be displayed in their entirety: http://www.example.org .

Unlike in the case of internal links, as gives as.

See URLs in external links for more detailed information.

Special:Linksearch finds all pages linking to a given site.

More help

Consult the User's Guide for information on using the wiki software.

• Configuration settings list
• MediaWiki FAQ
• MediaWiki release mailing list*Races