So, you're brand new to wiki editing, you haven't a clue how to link pages, add headers, create line breaks or put in some bullet points. Don't panic! Coding and editing pages looks pretty scary at first sight, but once you start to become familiar with different actions, it all looks rather simple. So that's what this page will do - guide you through a few simple actions that will allow you to go and do some basic editing of you driver's profile or a race report. Let's go!
Lesson #1 - creating links
One of the most fundamental parts of any wiki is the links on its pages. These bind everything together and make the wiki a single structure. If you create a page that has no links in it, and no other pages link to it, it is known as an "orphan" - i.e. it is isolated, and unable to be seen by people navigating around the wiki. Therefore, when you create a page, it's imperative that another page has a link to it!
But how do you actually create a link? Here's how.
Let's take a piece of text from the F1RWRS team, Prospec's page:
Pemberton Prospec Racing or Prospec is a British racing team, one of the most successful in F1RWRS history. The team won the first two F1RWRS Constructors' Championships as well as a Drivers' Championship with Nathanael Spencer in 2011.
Within that, there are a number of links to other pages, the blue text. Clicking on them takes you to other pages within the wiki. Let's take a section of that text and see what it looks like as it appears in the editing area:
The team won the first two F1RWRS Constructors' Championships as well as a Drivers' Championship with [[Nathanael Spencer]]
Nathanael Spencer is one of the pages linked to on the Prospec page and is done so by adding two squared brackets either side of his name, as you can see in the code above. When adding a link like this, you must make sure that the name of the page you want to link to is identical to the one in the text, even down to the capitalisation of letters. For example if we tried to link nathanael spencer, it wouldn't work, hence the red text.
Often however a page's name is too long and doesn't fit in well with flowing text. In these instances it may be more preferable to have an abbreviation, or shorten the name of a team for example. Using the excerpt from the Prospec page again,
one of the most successful in [[Formula 1 Rejects World Race Series|F1RWRS]] history.
Here we can see that the "Formula 1 Rejects World Race Series" page has been linked to, but that title is very cumbersome, and so the abbreviation "F1RWRS" has been used instead. The link however still goes to the correct page because of the way it has been written in the editing area. The original page name of "Formula 1 Rejects World Race Series" is written first, and is followed by a "|" and then the abbreviation. This second part is what actually appears on the page, whilst the first part is the actual link. Think of it as a 'mask' over the original link to make the text on the Prospec page read better.
It doesn't matter what you put after the "|", as long as the first part matches the title of the page you want to link to exactly then the link will work regardless, for example, best championship ever, Mark Dagnall or SRWR1F all go to the same page. Try it!
Lesson #2 - creating headers for sections and subsections
Pretty much every page is going to have them, headers such as the one immediately above, to break the page into defined sections. It's remarkably simple to stick these into a page, and all depends on how many "equals" symbols (=) you want to use.
The one above looks like this in the editing area:
==Lesson #2 - creating headers for sections and subsections==
Come up with your title, and then depending on its importance, assign it one, two, three or four equals signs either side of the title. The fewer the equals signs, the more importance is given to the title. When you create three or four titles in one page, it will automatically generate a contents box at the top left of the page to aid with navigation, which is useful!
Lesson #3 - creating bold and italic text
Again, this one is nice and simple, and just involves the use of single apostrophes like you'd use on "it's" or "he's", etc.
In order to create bold text like so, just write it out in the editing area as follows:
'''bold text'''
The text you want to make bold should have three single apostrophes either side. Don't use double apostrophes (speech marks) because they won't work, it must be single ones.
For italic text, just reduce the number of apostrophes to two instead of three:
''italic text''
You can also create bold and italic text together, which just adds both sets of apostrophes together, so use five either side:
'''''bold and italic text'''''
Simples!
Lesson #4 - creating bullet points
Bullet points can be useful occasionally for creating lists of facts or summarising something for easy reading. Creating them for wiki pages couldn't be easier.
Start your bullet point with an asterisk (*), a space, and then the text itself. For example:
* This is a bullet point.
This in the editing area would create this on the page:
Repeat that as many times as you need to, what could be easier?
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