Help:Editing

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. In the latter case, 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.

Using wikEd on CAZypedia

wikEd is a javascript program that runs by default on all CAZypedia user accounts. Therefore, there's nothing to install or configure. All you need is 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.

MediaWiki syntax

MediaWiki is the engine that drives CAZypedia, rendering all of the ugly data into the nice-looking format that your web browser presents. 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.

wikEd

wikEd 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!

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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.