Preservapedia:Tutorial (Formatting)



Formatting Preservapedia articles is a bit different from writing on a standard word processor. Instead of a strict WYSIWYG approach ("What You See Is What You Get"), Preservapedia uses text codes to create particular elements of the page (e.g. headings). This "language" is known as Wikitext (or Wiki-markup) and is designed for ease of editing.

Bold and italics
The most commonly used wiki tags are bold and italics. Bolding and italicizing are done by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes ('):

On Preservapedia, the names of an article's subject are written in bold when they are first mentioned in the article. For example, the article Terrazzo begins:


 * Terrazzo is a type of flooring made from hard stone pieces embedded in cement.

Italics may be used for the names of books, movies, albums, and computer/video game titles. If the first mention of the subject of an article is also a book or movie title then bold italics is used.

Preservapedia defers to Wikipedia's Manual of Style in technical questions regarding the writing and format of articles. For more information about when to use bold and italics, see the Wikipedia Manual of Style.

Headings and subheadings
Headings and subheadings are an easy way to improve the organization of an article. If you can see two or more distinct topics being discussed, you can break up the article by inserting a heading for each section.

Headings can be created like this:

{| width=100% style="border:none; text-align:left;"  ==Heading== 
 * style="background:#E6F2FF; padding:0.3em; text-align:center;"|You type
 * width="80%" style="background:#E6F2FF; padding:0.3em; text-align:center;"|You get
 * width="80%" style="background:#E6F2FF; padding:0.3em; text-align:center;"|You get

Heading
 ===Subheading=== 



Subheading

 * }

If an article has at least four headings, a table of contents will automatically be generated. Try creating a heading in this page's /sandbox/. It will be added automatically to the table of contents for the page, assuming three others already exist.

HTML
Wikitext contains all the features required to follow Preservapedia's formatting conventions and knowledge of HTML code is not necessary, although it is often used for more specific formatting such as using colors, text and paragraph styles, and page layout.

See How to edit a page or the Cheatsheet for more on editing a page. Test what you have learned in the /sandbox/

Continue the tutorial with Preservapedia links &rarr;