HowDoIEdit

How do I edit ?

See HowDoINavigate for navigation instructions.

Click "Edit this page" at the bottom of any page where you're allowed. If you're not allowed to edit, you may be allowed to comment - see below for details. (See RegulatingYourPages for info about who's allowed to do what.) The SandBox is a good place to practice editing and creating pages.

ZWiki text is designed to be easy to edit and read in its raw form, while retaining the benefits of fancy formatting, document structure, linking, and all the other great features of web presentation. TextFormattingRules goes into the essentials of this formatting.

The edit form has a slot for a brief log message, to convey the essence of your changes. The current page log message is shown on the RecentChanges page, conveying at a glance what the last change is. The log message also shows in the page history and manager's undo views - they can help substantially to orient people, and are worth filling in.

Some pages are set by their owners to allow commenting, rather than, or in addition to, editing. The comments are appended to the ends of the pages, along with the commentor's id and the date. The comment form includes a copy of the page with every line prefixed by ">", ripe for citing by copying into the comment area. The ">" prefixed comment lines are automatically treated as preformatted regions, exempt from text flowing and other wiki-page processing.

How do I link and create new pages ?

To create a link to another wiki page, just write a WikiName. (Alternately, you can create wiki links by enclosing arbitrary phrases in '[square brackets]?' - but that can create hard-to-remember names with hard-to-type URLs?. WikiNames are the vocabulary of the wiki - it's a Good Thing to have them regular and recognizable in-and-of themselves.)

If the page does not yet exist, and you're allowed to create pages from the current page, a ? will be displayed - click it to create the new page. This is how new wiki pages are added.

At the point of page creation, text at the top of the form offers a link to an alternate form where you can select a file or an image, to upload, instead, as the content of the page.

To link to a page on another site, just type the url. Or, you can use HTML. Also, RemoteWikiLinks are a convenient notation for linking to pages on another site.

When you're not allowed to create new pages from that spot (again, see RegulatingYourPages), you will see **^x** by the potential wiki link. Following that link will bring you to the source of the current page - once again, see RegulatingYourPages for info about who's allowed to do what.

What if I make a mistake ?

If some good text gets lost by mistake, you might find it by backing up in your browser - copy and paste back it into the page. If you successfully commit your edits, but they're incorrect, you can use the history mechanism to refer back to previous versions of the page to recover old text, and/or bring an entire copy of an old page into the present. See the history link in the footer at the bottom of every page, or the edited link at the very top.

If all that fails, the site admin may be able to help undo the changes.