Help:Editing


 * If you'd like to try out the editing information which is explained below, please use the sandbox to play.


 * This is a short tutorial on editing Clean City pages. For more detail, please see the Wikipedia tutorial, on which this was based.

Registration and logging in
You can read and edit pages without creating an account or logging in. To create an account (which is free), just click the "create an account or log in" link at the top right corner of any page.

Creating an account is the only way to clearly attribute your work. Without a username, edits you make will be attributed to the numerical IP address of your computer instead. Logging in therefore also increases your privacy, because your IP address will be hidden once you are logged in.

There are many other benefits, such as user preferences, the ability to move pages, and a watchlist to keep an eye on selected pages. See "Why create an account?" on Wikipedia for some more arguments.

See Help:Create an account.

Policies
Do not submit copyrighted material without permission. The best content is usually written from either personal knowledge or through the synthesis of research from multiple sources. For a more detailed discussion of copyrights, see Clean City copyrights.

Clean City encourages an atmosphere of friendliness and openness. Members of the community are expected to behave in a generally civil manner. You should always assume good faith on the part of other editors.

See Clean City policies and the terms of use for more information.

Editing
Like all wikis, you can edit any non-protected page. Your changes will be visible immediately. Just click the "edit" link that appears at the top of every page.

Explain your edit in the "Summary" box between the edit window and the save and preview buttons. eg: "typo" or "added info on xyz".

Use the show preview button to check your edit and get the formatting right before saving. Remember to save your preview before moving on.

If you are logged in, you can mark an edit as minor by checking the This is a minor edit box to let people know your edit is not something substantive.

To try editing, open a new window and go to the Sandbox (which is an editing test area), and then click the "edit" link. Add something and click preview or save.

Formatting
Most text formatting is usually done with wiki markup, so you don't have to learn HTML.

Bold and italics
Bold and italics are added by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes ('):


 * is rendered as italics. (2 apostrophes on either side)
 * is rendered as bold. (3 apostrophes on either side)
 * is rendered as bolded italics. (2 + 3 = 5 apostrophes on either side)

Superscript and subscript

 * Superscript, e. g. foo123 can be added as
 * Subscript like bar456, correspondingly, is indicated by

Coloring
gives

This is red text.

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 your article by inserting a heading for each section.

Headings can be created like this:
 * (2 equals signs)
 * (3 equals signs)
 * (4 equals signs)
 * (5 equals signs)

For instance, the heading of this section, Headings and subheadings, is a subheading (provided with 3 equals signs) of the top level heading Formatting (2 equals signs).

If an article has at least three headings, a table of contents (TOC) will be automatically generated. Try creating some headings in the sandbox and see the effect on the TOC.

The creation of a TOC can be disabled by adding to the page source.

Indenting
To indent text, place a colon at the beginning of a line. The more colons you put, the further indented the text will be. A newline (pressing Enter or Return) marks the end of the indented paragraph.

For example:

is shown as:

This is aligned all the way to the left.
 * This is indented slightly.
 * This is indented more.

Bullet points
To insert a bullet, use an asterisk. Similar to simple indentation, more asterisks in front of a paragraph means more indentation.

A brief example:

Which is shown as:
 * First list item
 * Second list item
 * Sub-list item under second
 * Isn't this fun?

Numbered lists
You can also create numbered lists. For this, use the number sign or hash symbol. Using more s will affect the level of indenting.

Example:

Shows up as:
 * 1) First item
 * 2) Second item
 * 3) Sub-item under second item
 * 4) Third item

Preformatted text
Lines that start with a space are displayed in a separate box in monospace font. This is particularly useful to show code or other preformatted text in a readable manner.

Example:

Start = a where a = 5

To actually see how it's done, click at the little edit link in the upper right corner of this paragraph and have a look there at the source.

Raw text
It is possible to circumvent some wiki formatting. Markup enclosed in



tags is not processed but shown literally.

For instance,



gives


 * just too much  boldness 

rather than


 * just too much boldness.

Links
Links are important on wikis to help readers navigate your site.

Internal links
You can extensively cross-reference Clean City pages using internal links. You can add links to existing titles, and also to titles you think ought to exist in future.

To make a link to another page, just put the title in double square brackets.

For example, if you want to make a link to, say, the Unboxing page, it would be:

If you want to use words other than the article title as the text of the link, you can add an alternative name after the pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and other keyboards).

For example, if you wanted to make a link to Question 43, but wanted it to say "discussion on evaluation order" you would write it as such:

It would appear as:
 * See the discussion on evaluation order...

When you want to use the plural of an article title (or add any other suffix) for your link, you can add the extra letters directly outside the double square brackets.

For example, you would write:



It would appear as:


 * Add questions to the collection of quizzes.

Interlanguage links
Clean City can be made available in multiple languages. To add a link in the sidebar from an article on the English Clean City to the German version of the same article, type:

"De" is the language code for German. The link will appear in the sidebar as "Deutsch" and link to The German Clean City article on compiling.

See Help:Interlanguage links

Interwiki links
Clean City is hosted by Wikia (formerly known as Wikicities). To link to another Wikia, you can use its title followed by a colon and the article name, instead of using the full URL.

For example, the Delphi wiki home page is at Delphi:Main Page, which can be typed as
 * Delphi:Main Page
 * rather than as http://delphi.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

This style of link works for any wiki in the interwiki map, not just for Wikia. See Help:Interwiki link.

Redirects
To redirect automatically from one page to another, type #REDIRECT and then put in brackets the name of the page to be redirected to.

For example, you could redirect from "Arrays" to "Array". That way, anyone typing either version in the search box will automatically go to "Array".

Wiki variables and templates
If you have something that needs to be included on many other pages, you might want to use a template.

For instance,

prints out as

Basically, templates are pages in the Template namespace. This means any page beginning with "Template:", such as Template:Templatename.

Templates are used to add recurring messages to pages in a consistent way, to add boilerplate messages, to create navigational boxes and to provide cross-language portability of texts.

There are two ways a template can be applied:


 * 1)  works as a placeholder in the page source which is replaced with the actual content of the corresponding Template:Templatename each time the page is visited.


 * 1)  is substituted by the content of the corresponding template immediately when the page is saved. The template identifier does not occur anymore in the resulting page source code.

Check out the current list of Clean City templates or the list of shared wikia templates. Many templates available on the Central Wikia can be used in Clean City as well, with just "Wikia:" prefixed to the name. See Wikia:Help:Shared templates for details.

You can also define new templates by yourself. To do so, create the page  and provide the content there that shall be substituted for the command  wherever the latter is used. To avoid unnecessary complications to other Clean Citizens, it is a good idea to choose an established name for the template (unless there is none). The template list of Wikia and the wikipedia pages on template may serve as references.

There is a comprehensive guide to templates at metawiki. If you are interested to know what exactly you can do with templates beyond the simple application outlined above, have a look there.

Discussion pages
Discussion or "talk" pages are for communicating with other Clean Citizens.

To discuss any page, go to that page and then click the "discussion" tab at the top of the page. Add a new comment at the end, or below the comment you are replying to.

Sign your comments by typing  to insert your username and a timestamp.

Use indenting to format your discussion. Standard practice is to indent your reply one level deeper than the comment you are replying to.

Experiment by editing the talk page of the sandbox.

User talk pages
Everyone has a user talk page, on which other people can leave public messages. If someone has left you a message, you will see a note saying "You have new messages", with a link to your user talk page.

You can reply on the user talk page of the person you're replying to or on your own talk page beneath the original message. If you reply on their talk page, they will receive notification of it.