This is a walkthrough of the basics of wiki markup--how to make bold text and links to other wiki pages. You can try out everything from this video in
your own user sandbox page. If you don't already have a sandbox page
enter "Help:Sandbox tutorial" in the Wikipedia search box; that page has instructions for starting a sandbox.
To begin, press the
edit button on your sandbox page. This will
open an edit window where you can begin these exercises. We'll start with the very basics:
bold. Bolded text appears at
the very beginning of most articles to
mark the subject of the article,
so it's one of the first things you'll need to learn.
You can make text bold by
highlighting it with your mouse, then clicking the
"B" button in the edit toolbar. This adds
three single quote marks at the beginning of
what you want to be bold, and another
three single quote marks at the end.
Let's see what this looks like.
Go to the bottom of the edit window,
enter a brief edit summary to describe your edit,
and press "Save page". It's good to get in the habit of leaving edit summaries every you time edit. It helps you keep track of what you've done, and it makes it easier to collaborate with others.
You should have some
bold text on your test page now. Press the
edit button and
let's continue. This time, we'll make
wikilinks. These are
links that go from one page on Wikipedia to another.
Let's try it with the word "bold". To create a wikilink,
highlight the word, then click the
link icon in the edit toolbar. This brings up
the "insert link" dialog. Clicking
the "insert link" button will add
the code for a link:
two opening square brackets, followed by
the article you want to link to--in this case, bold--, followed by
two closing square brackets. Now
enter an edit summary and save.
The word "bold" is now blue, and links to the article about bold. Well,
the article for bold is actually called "Emphasis (typography)", and that's where the link redirects us.
But what if that's not what you wanted to link to? What if you meant
boldness, the opposite of being shy? Let's
edit the page again. This time, in the
insert link dialog, replace
"bold" with
"boldness" in the "target page or URL" section. Now, pressing
"insert link" creates a
"piped link", which is the wiki markup for a link with text that is different from the name of the article it points to. It consists of
two opening square brackets, like a plain link, followed by
the name of the article you want to link to, boldness, then
a pipe -- which you can insert by pressing shift-backlash on most keyboards -- after the article name. Then
the text you want for the link: bold, then
two closing square brackets. That's
text. If you
save your changes [don't forget the edit summary]
you'll see the result: the link says
bold, and when you
click, you get the article "boldness". So go ahead. Start editing.
Be Bold!