Help:Editing

Use Firefox

CAZypedia works best using the Firefox browser. Get Firefox here. CAZypedia's advanced editor, wikEd, requires Firefox.

Preamble: CAZypedia and WYSIWYG editing

The nature of the wiki format which forms the basis of CAZypedia does not lend itself very well to WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing that most of us are used to. Unlike word processing software, where what you type is immediately formatted on the screen and later appears on the printed page, wiki editing is a bit more like making a web page. Text is typed in an unformatted form, which is later formatted on-the-fly according to specific formatting "tags" embedded in the text itself.

The reasons wikis, and thus CAZypedia, use this less user-friendly way are mainly technical, having to do with using a web browser as an input tool and a remote web server as the data storage device. People who are used to "markup" computer languages (like HTML) will have little trouble getting used to the wiki way of formatting text. To ease the pain for everyone else, CAZypedia implements an almost WYSIWYG editor called wikEd. wikEd was develped to make life easier for Wikipedia contributors, and since CAZypedia runs the same wiki software (MediaWiki), we can benefit from wikEd, too (see below).

Quick links for Mediawiki formatting

MediaWiki is the engine that drives CAZypedia. These links provide an overview of the basic "markup" (formatting rules) that CAZypedia uses:

• Basic editing & markup
• More markup examples - including inserting pictures
• Advanced editing - all kinds of cool stuff, including making links, math, special characters, and templates.
• There's even a handy printable reference card.

Making life a bit easier: The wikEd editor in CAZypedia

• CAZypedia uses an advanced editor called wikEd, which can be used to add most of the markup listed on the pages above, and therefore greatly simplifies making and editing CAZypedia pages. Some current features include (from the main wikEd page:

• Wikicode syntax highlighting
• Pasting, import, and conversion of formatted text, e.g. from Microsoft-Word and web pages
• Regular expression search and replace
• Edit preview and show changes on the same page without reloading
• Fullscreen editing mode
• Single-click fixing of common mistakes
• History for summary, search, and replace fields
• Jump to selected heading
• Type-ahead find

The wikEd help page contains a tutorial and full details on the function of all of the buttons in wikEd.

• Tip: If you plan to cut and paste formatted text into CAZypedia, make sure to become familiar with the "Wikify" button!

• Note: To use wikEd, you need a Mozilla browser (Firefox 1.5 or higher, Mozilla 1.3 or higher, or SeaMonkey) with javascript enabled; Microsoft Internet Explorer and Opera Browser currently don't work with wikEd.

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Although wikEd is both quite good and quite powerful, patiently bear in mind that you will have to understand the MediaWiki markup to fix things when they don't look quite right. Soon enough, editing pages in CAZypedia will become second nature.

References to the literature

• There are special features to help add literature references to CAZypedia entries; for detailed instructions, please see the Help:References page.