Microtonal Encyclopedia:Newbie editors - getting started

You don't need to worry about messing things up while editing, because it is very easy to undo by using the history. Every version of the page is kept in its history so in the worst case you just roll back to the previous version.

Basics
You can do test edits in the sandbox in the user drop menu. Editors also can use this to compose text before they post it into an article, or to compose talk page comments too.

If you want to discuss the articles, do it on their discussion pages.

If you want to alert another editor to a talk page comment do it via a ping, e.g. you can ping me with which renders as  (though not sure if that is working)  - or add a comment to their personal talk page.

The pages are actually written in wikitext, which you see if you click "Edit source". I've also enabled a visual editor which is what the normal "Edit" button takes you to, which is more like editing in Word though a little clunky. Some of you may find that easier, especially if the page has a lot of wikitext markup.

Any questions do contact me - for instance on my talk page or via email - to support@robertinventor.com - you should also be able to email me via my user page here. Robertinventor (talk) 05:18, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

Basics of Wikitext markup
Wikitext is a straightforward syntax. For the help pages in Wikipedia on wikitext see:


 * Wikipedia:Help:Wikitext


 * Wikipedia:Help:Cheatsheet

Here are some of the things you use most often - try then out in your sandbox:

For a header it's

==Header==

You add more equal signs for sub-headers

===Header===

For citations you do

The citations show up in the reference section - the end of the page if not specified. To specify a reference section use

==References==

For internal links Article name

For external links, usually put into footnotes, or an external links section, you do

text for link

You can embed YouTube videos into the pages, with CODE

Itallics as italicized and bold as bold

On talk pages sign your posts with ~

Quotes
Quotes as



(the : just indents the quoted text)

or better:

(does the same thing, but if it was ever needed, we can change how it is displayed by editing the Quote template).

Templates
Quote is an example of a template. Starts with two opening braces, the name of the template, then the | character, then the various arguments separated by '|'s and then two closing braces.

Here is an example which I just added recently, Ratio Intervals - it displays a ratio in various ways in a floating box to right of the text and I've started using it in the Intervals articles. As:

E.g.

(see the box to the right of this page).

Talk pages
Customary to indent each comment over the one above in a conversation using : Iincrease by one indent :: etc.

to outdent back to the top level if it has indented too far.

Marking an article as "In use
Sometimes when editing you'll get a warning of an edit conflict, that someone else has edited the article at the same time as you, then you have to resolve this by looking at the diffs and then if their edit is a good one, copy / paste your text manually back into their edit (or vice versa). This can be tiresome if you are in the middle of a major rewrite.

Also if you copy the text into your user space, or off wiki, edit it and then copy back, you may lose any edits by anyone else in between. They are still there in the article history, nothing is lost, but you are in the same situation you have to do a merge in of any significant new edits.

So, if you do it that way, you need to mark the page as in use, so that others know not to edit it. To do that just add this to the top of the page.

And then when you have finished your editing, then remove the template.

I am not expecting us to have many editors so it should be no problem having a page in use for a day or two or more. This template is normally left in place for only a few hours, but as this is a small wiki with few editors, then do feel free to mark an article as in use for longer. It's not likely to be a problem unless it's an article that's being actively edited by another editor.