Editing

Editing a wiki page is really easy! You can edit any article, and post your changes immediately.

Make your changes
To edit an article, click on the "edit this page" tab at the top of the page. This brings you to a text box with the editable text.

Then you can just type away in the box. Add facts, move sentences around, fix problems. Be bold! Wikis develop faster when everyone joins in. Be merciless in your edits, and expect that other people will boldly and mercilessly edit what you write. That's the nature of a wiki.

Don't be put off by the formatting codes; they're not as mysterious as they look. Most of the things you'll want to do can be done with just a character or two -- linking to another page, adding an external link, creating a heading or a list. Check out the page on wiki markup to learn what you need to know.

But the best way to learn how to edit pages is to see how other people did it. If you see something on a page that you want to learn how to do, click on "edit this page" and check it out. Feel free to copy and paste the text into another page; that's how most wiki pages are made.

You can always click "Show Preview" to see how your page will look before you actually save it.

Add a Summary
Once you've typed your changes into the text box, add a few words in the Summary box. Your summary shows up on the page's "history," and it helps everyone keep track of who did what to the page. You can also click the "This is a minor edit" box, if all you did was a small spelling or grammar correction.

If you've deleted some text from a page, please explain the deletion in your Summary. Otherwise, the person who wrote that text might think you're being mean, or sneaky. A good Summary can avoid a lot of problems and hurt feelings!

Save your edits
Then just click on the "Save page" button, and there you go! Your changes instantly appear on the page.

Discussion pages
Every article is paired with a discussion page. Click the "Discussion" tab at the top of any article to see what people are saying about it. You can use the discussion page for any questions or comments that you have about the article. If there's some disagreement about the content of a particular page, you can talk about it on the discussion page, and work out the problem.

When you post on a Discussion page, or a user's Talk page, you should sign your post with four tildes, like this: ~ The four tildes automatically become your signature, with a time-stamp.

History pages
On a wiki, nothing is gone forever! You can click on the "History" tab on any article, and that'll bring up a list of every revision made to the article. Click around in the history, and you'll be able to see what was changed, and who changed it. The history page is really useful if you need to fix an article that's been vandalized.

Using your watchlist
You can use your watchlist to keep an eye on any article. This is useful when you've edited an article, and you want to see what other people add to it.

Click on the "watch" tab on any article to add it to your watchlist. When you're editing a page, you can also click on the "Watch this page" box.

Once you have a page on your watchlist, you can click on the "my watchlist" button at the top right of your screen. That'll bring up a history of everything on your list, with the last change made to each page.

Have fun!
You have a lot of power on a wiki! It may seem intimidating at first, but try it out, and you'll see how much fun it is to collaborate with the group. Have fun!