Welcome to the Editing Crash Course, a series of tutorials which cover all aspects of editing, from the very basics of putting text on a page, to the more advanced topics such as using footnotes.
Note: The Editing Crash Course includes pointers on relevant Wikipedia policies, however, it does not exhaustively cover many aspects of policy.
Lessons
editYou can take the lessons in any order. Feel free to deviate from the order in which things are taught here, and conduct your own supporting experiments.
Preparation
editUsers learning to edit following this course may find it useful to have a personal sandbox, a repository for tests and learning wikimarkup without damaging article content. This lesson teaches how to create your sandbox.
Basic Editing
editThe most vital act of all is placing text on a page. This lesson details how to do it; no frills, just plain old alphanumeric text.
MediaWiki interprets whitespace in a manner different to that of a word processor. This lesson explains how to make text appear as you want it.
The essence of the wiki is in its links to other pages, which encourage page growth. This lesson explains how to create links to other pages on the wiki.
Once you've got your text on the page, making it stand out is the next step. This lesson teaches how to make text bold, italic, and how to underline and strike-through (cross out) text.
MediaWiki contains features which allow for proper organisation of page flow, including a number of heading levels. This lesson explains how to use headings, and discusses the benefits, including the table of contents.
MediaWiki can format text in bulleted or numbered lists. This lesson explains how to create these.