Wiki Formatting Help

This is a basic introduction to wiki syntax on this site. Please be aware that not all of these formatting options will be available everywhere you can enter wiki text. Generally, if you're entering text into a small text area (e.g. comments), you should only count on being able to use links and font styles. For larger text areas, where you're contributing large blocks of content, you can use lists, headings, and paragraphs, among other things.

Images ¶ 

Upload images and drag and drop them in the wiki page or associate them with the particular step in a guide.

In a document, the syntax for image is:

[image|img-number|size=standard|caption=text|align=center]

Wiki image size options: standard, medium (default is standard)

Image alignment options: left, center, right (default is right)

Links are automatically created for things that look like URLs. The protocol (http://, https://, ftp://, etc.) is required. For example:

http://www.makezine.com

Yields http://www.makezine.com. If you want to provide your own link text, then you'll need to get a bit fancier:

[http://www.makezine.com|Makezine]

Which yields Makezine.

Wiki links behave very similarly to normal links, but are enclosed in double square brackets. Note that you can supply your own link text by adding it as an optional second argument:

* [[Info:WikiSyntax]]
* [[Info:WikiSyntax|A link to this article]]

Which yields:

The link is given by the article's name with an optional namespace on the front, separated by a colon. If no namespace is supplied, then the default namespace is used. The square brackets and vertical bar to separate arguments are a common pattern you'll see applied throughout our wiki markup language.

You can generate links to multiple wiki articles at once using the wikilist tag and specifying one or more comma-separated tags to select articles by. A given article must match all of the listed tags in order to be displayed. Assuming you pick tags that actually match some articles, you'll get a tabular layout of article links, each link consisting of a thumbnail image and the article title. You can also narrow the search beyond the tags, to a particular namespace. You might use the tag like this:

== Articles about Category X ==

[wikilist|category-x]

== Category X articles that are also about Category Y ==

[wikilist|category-x,category-y]

== Info articles about Category X ==

[wikilist|category-x|namespace=Info]

You can add tags to an article from the article's edit page.

Guide links automatically add in the title of the guide that you're linking to. Or, if you like you can specify the link text like any other link. Note that you use the guide number to specify which guide (the guide number can be found in the URL of the guide.)

* [guide|55]
* [guide|A link to this guide]

Which yields:

Font Styles ¶ 

The usual font styles are provided for:

* ''Italic''
* '''Bold'''
* '''''Super bold'''''
* ``monospace``
* x^^2^^ (superscript)
* H,,2,,O (subscript)

This yields:

  • Italic
  • Bold
  • Super bold
  • monospace
  • x2 (superscript)
  • H2O (subscript)

These styles should really only be used on plain text, and shouldn't be wrapped around newlines. It's okay to put them around things like links, but only if it's necessary for the purpose at hand (not to achieve a particular look). These styles are not intended to be used within link tags on the custom link text.

Lists ¶ 

You've already seen lists in action throughout these examples (the asterisk at the front of each example line), but only in their most rudimentary form. You can create nested lists by adding an asterisk for each level of indent, and you can get numbered lists by using a pound sign (#) instead of an asterisk. You can mix numbered and unordered lists, but you must be consistent within each list.

* Macs
** Mac Laptops
### iBook
### MacBook
### ...
** Mac Desktops
### iMac
### Mac mini
### ...
* iPods
## Mini
## Nano
## ...

This yields:

  • Macs
    • Mac Laptops
      1. iBook
      2. MacBook
      3. ...
    • Mac Desktops
      1. iMac
      2. Mac mini
      3. ...
  • iPods
    1. Mini
    2. Nano
    3. ...

Note that exactly one newline separates each line of the list. Putting a blank line between two lines of a list will result in two lists, which isn't usually what you want.

Headings and Paragraphs ¶ 

You can create headings for sections and subsections by wrapping a line of text in two or more (up to six) equal signs (=). Each matching pair of equal signs makes the heading smaller, corresponding to a less significant subsection. You can't use one equal sign, because that level heading is reserved for the title of the entire page. For example:

== A top-level heading ==
=== A sub-section heading ===
==== A sub-sub-section heading ====
===== And so on... =====

You can see the how level two headings are rendered throughout this page. The others are similar, just increasingly smaller.

Paragraphs happen more-or-less automatically, so you shouldn't have to think about them too much. Any time you separate two or more lines of text with one or more newlines (exactly one blank line is preferred), each block of text is made into a paragraph unless it's already a block-level element like a list or a heading. A good rule of thumb is to separate each logical thing in your document with a blank line, for example:

=== A simple example ===

A simple example of preferred usage of whitespace when writing. This is the first paragraph.

This is the second paragraph. It'll be followed by a list:

* A list with a few items:
** Item one.
** Item two.
** Item three.

This is the third and final paragraph.

This yields:

A simple example ¶ 

A simple example of preferred usage of whitespace when writing. This is the first paragraph.

This is the second paragraph. It'll be followed by a list:

  • A list with a few items:
    • Item one.
    • Item two.
    • Item three.

This is the third and final paragraph.

Escaping Wiki Formatting ¶ 

You can escape wiki formatting with a [raw]...[/raw] block. The text between the raw tags will be completely left alone and won't be interpreted as part of any wiki markup. It won't be displayed any differently, though, as the purpose is just to escape wiki formatting (conversely, the ``...`` font style just displays text as monospace and does not escape wiki formatting).

If you want to display a block of raw text differently for purposes of explanation, you can wrap the text in ``...`` if you want it to display as monospaced within a line, or you can wrap it in [code]...[/code] if you want it to display in a block of its own (like the examples on this page). For instance:

* [raw]``This text is not monospace``[/raw].
* Links look like ``[raw][http://www.makezine.com][/raw]``.

[code]
An example within the example!
Nested code tags are okay, so long as they match.
[/code]

This yields:

  • ``This text is not monospace``.
  • Links look like [http://www.makezine.com].
An example within the example!
Nested code tags are okay, so long as they match.

Videos ¶ 

You can also add videos to wiki articles (but not guides, presently, other than in the introduction). The tag format is similar to that for images, but rather than identifying videos by a numeric identifier specific to Make:Projects, we identify them by a link to the video on the service where the video is hosted (e.g. Vimeo or YouTube). So to add a video to a wiki article, you just need to manually create a tag that looks like the following:

[video|<link to video>|size={small,large}|align={left,right,center}]

As with images, the size and align arguments are optional, but for videos they default to large and center respectively. You can add a caption to a video, but the formatting is different than that for images, and consequently you can add wiki markup to the caption text. Here's an example use of the video tag, complete with caption text that includes a link:

[video|http://vimeo.com/6659283]A video about [http://makezine.com|Make].[/video]

Note that without a caption, there's no closing [/video] tag, but that to provide a caption, a closing tag is added and the caption text is nested between the opening and closing tag.

Presently, the only video hosting services that we support are Vimeo and YouTube.