Help:Basic Wiki Markup

A brief guide to wiki markup is below. For more on editing, see the How to edit a page on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Meta-wiki pages for editors. Go ahead and edit without worrying about having to know everything about wiki markup; one of the cool things about wikis is that more experienced users can fix your markup, and as you become more comfortable with wikis, you can fix the markup of others. The most important thing is to share your ideas...making them look pretty is secondary.

Entering and styling text

To enter or edit text on a PMID or other wiki page, just click on the link that says Edit. You'll get a web form, where you can modify the sections- e.g. "Materials and Methods Used". Often, you may want to post to the discussion page for a wiki page first. To do this, click on the discussion tab, and then on the edit tab for the discussion page or on any internal edit link on the page if you just want to edit a subsection.

The wiki software allows you to preview what you entered by using the "Show preview" button. For the most part, you can just type in the space and the desired text will show up. However, here are some basic ways the text can be modified using wiki markup (intentionally or unintentionally!) to change the appearance of text on the page.

Style	Markup
italics	''italics'': two single quotes on each side of the italic text
bold	'''bold''': three single quotes on each side of the bold text

Different levels of headings can be made by flanking text with different numbers of = signs, like ==heading== or ===heading===. To show as headings, these must be at the start of a new line. Headings create new editable subsections, and also generate table of contents links.

Text on a line that starts with blank spaces will be put in a box.

Text on a line that starts with a colon ":" will be indented.

Different numbers of :'s give different levels of indentations

Linking

One important thing in this wiki is to be able to add links to other pages, or to external websites. It's also useful to be able to assign new pages to the categories that correspond to ECO nodes. Linking to another page in the wiki can be as simple as putting text between double square brackets. For example, the Sandbox is a page that users can use to play around with wiki markup. This link was generated like this:

For example, the [[Sandbox]] is a page that users can use to play around with wiki markup.

Double brackets are used to link to pages inside the wiki, or to another wiki using Interwiki links. If the linked page exists, then the link will take a reader there when it's clicked. However, you can also create a link to a page that doesn't exist yet. This will show up on the page in red, and clicking on it will take the reader to an edit page where new content can be created.

Here is an example of a link to an external website: The Evidence Ontology is at evidenceontology.org

The Evidence Ontology website is at [http://evidenceontology.org/Welcome.html]

The link is surrounded by single square brackets. Inside the brackets there is the URL, a space, and then the linked text. If you leave out the linked text, it will look like this [1]. If there is no URL (no "http://"), it will look like this: [evidenceontology.org/Welcome.html]

Sometimes you want to link to a page using different linked text than the page name. For example, this links to the Sandbox page: The Sandbox is a page for trying out wiki markup. This is made using a vertical line (a pipe, above the backslash on US keyboards)

The Sandbox is a page for [[Sandbox|trying out wiki markup]].

Linking to an ECO node

The pages for ECO nodes in this wiki are special pages called Category Pages. This means that [[Category:ECO:0000178_!_in_vivo_assay_evidence]] links to a nonexistent page. You can link to a GO node without assigning the page to that node, using [[:Category:ECO:0000178_!_in_vivo_assay_evidence|Category:ECO:0000178_!_in_vivo_assay_evidence]], like this: Category:ECO:0000178_!_in_vivo_assay_evidence. Note that here I am linking to the page for a GO term, but I don't want this Help page to be considered as an ECO code.

Creating new pages

As noted above, you can create a new page by linking to a new page title.