Help:Wiki editor's reference

From Bogleheads

This page contains references to resources for advanced users.

Wikitext

Wikipedia's Cheatsheet contains basic formatting commands. Content is more important than format. If you run into difficulty, please continue to edit and ask for help later. The editing toolbar will display help text when you hover the cursor over an icon.

Color

  • Foreground color: <span style="color:brown;">text</span> will display as text
  • Background color: <span style="color:white; background-color:gray">text</span> will display as text

You can use style= for tables.

MediaWiki understands color names as well as the hex codes. For example, you can use WhiteSmoke instead of #F5F5F5;.

Formatting text

Some text formats use HTML elements, for example bold (<b>), underline (<u>), superscript (<sup>), and subscript (<sub>). These tags work even if raw HTML is disabled (see below).

For more, see: Help:HTML in wikitext.

Images

  • Help:Images from MediaWiki, for help on how to size and frame images.
  • Force text to relocate after an image: <br style="clear: both" /> (Help:Images from MediaWiki).

Interwiki links

Interwiki links are links to pages of other wikis, using the wiki's built-in internal link style. There are quite a number of existing links already available, such as Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and Wikinews. For a short list, please see Manual:Interwiki (entered as [[mw:Manual:Interwiki|Manual:Interwiki]]).

  • [[acronym:ETF]] links to acronym:ETF. You can reformat this to show as [[acronym:ETF|]] (produces "ETF") - very useful in context.
  • [[google:investing]] creates a Google search for "investing": google:investing.
  • [[Wikipedia:John C. Bogle|Jack Bogle]] links to Jack Bogle

The Bogleheads' wiki is also customized to provide an interwiki link to our sister Canadian wiki, finiki. For example, [[finiki:RRSP|]] links to RRSP.

Links

You can use a bare protocol -- that is, without the https: or http: -- so that [//www.bogleheads.org/forum Bogleheads forum] displays as Bogleheads forum.

Math

See Math formulas in the wiki.

Parameters, parsing

Tables

  • The basics: Help:Tables, from MediaWiki.
  • Comprehensive: Help:Table, from Wikipedia. Lots of examples to do just about anything.
  • Use Excel2Wiki to create tables directly from a spreadsheet.

Templates

Mobile

Displaying wiki pages on mobile devices forces a number of compromises due to the small screen size.

HTML

Raw HTML

Using <html>...</html> in content pages poses a security risk. Because of this, only wiki administrators may create or edit templates containing HTML.

MediaWiki

Admin

Namespaces

See: Wikipedia:Namespace, from Wikipedia.

Page cache (refreshing)

Sometimes, the MediaWiki engine may fail to rebuild a page. The result is that the change appears to have no effect, despite the user reloading the page from their browser. For example, a new image is uploaded, but the new image or the page linking to that image does not show the new version.

Updating a Google widget such as Widget:Google Document may also result in this problem. See: Extension:Widgets#Troubleshooting, from MediaWiki.

In either case, the user needs to force a cache purge by appending ?action=purge to the browser's link. See: Manual:Purge from MediaWiki.

For example, you can purge the cache of this page using https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Help:Wiki_editor's_reference?action=purge.

Special pages

Special:Allpages

Special:Allpages displays all categories starting with a character or phrase.

  • {{Special:Allpages/Category:Main Page}} will display all categories starting with Main Page and go to the end
  • {{Special:Allpages/Category:V}} will display all categories starting with V and go to the end
  • {{Special:Allpages/Category:W}} will display all categories starting with W and go to the end

Widgets

A selection of Google Widgets is available:

Portals

Design guidelines used to create the former Main Page portal.

Wikipedia portal listings

Main page candidates

The Main Page was based on a mixture of these portals: