User:Sirdog/Quick editing guide
This guide is aimed at people who are completely unfamiliar with editing on MediaWiki sites but are familiar with traditional editing systems like WordPress, any sort of word document, and so on.
For information on how the markdown of MediaWiki pages work, see Help:Formatting.
Terminology
So that we share the same language, please commit the following terms to memory.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Wiki | A website that has a system in place to allow collaborative editing rather than a central authority dictating content, such as a blog. Think the Zelda Wiki, or Fandom itself. |
| Wikipedia | More properly known as the English Wikipedia, it is the online encyclopedia that everyone can edit that everyone knows of.[1] |
| Wikimedia | A non-profit foundation that performs the administration and systems upkeep of the various language editions of Wikipedia. |
| MediaWiki | A free and open source software that is designed to provide a wiki-style of editing to a website. This software is what runs this very website and the English Wikipedia. |
Creating pages
Creating pages is simple, yet unintuitive. One simply uses the search bar at the top right of any page and makes a search for the page (spelling and character-case matter) they would like to exist. A new page will appear telling the user the page does not yet exist and if they wish to create it. The user will click the red text that is the new page name, and then edit normally. Once the first edit to the page is published, the page will go live.
Renaming pages
Unlike traditional word processing systems, such as Google Docs, MediaWiki uses the title of a page as it's internal database identifier. Page names are not cosmetic. The changing of a page's name in any way is called, in MediaWiki terminology, moving the page. This is because the edit history and meta data have to be moved to the new page name for posterity. This is accomplished by hovering your mouse over the button that says "More" and selecting "Move".