Battlestar Wiki:Tutorial (Formatting)

This page (like all pages on this wiki) was imported from the original English-language Battlestar Wiki based on what was available in the Wayback Machine in early 2017. You can see the archive of the original page here.

This page is one of Battlestar Wiki's many projects.
This page serves to coordinate discussion on a particular aspect of this Wiki. The formal recommendations of a project may be treated as policies.

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BW:T
BW:TUT

Template:Tutorial

Most text formatting is usually done with Wiki markup, so people don't have to learn HTML. Wiki markup (BW:MARK) also allows the site to stay uniformed.

Wiki markup

Writing Battlerstar Wiki articles is a bit different from writing on a standard word processor. Instead of a strict "what you see is what you get" approach, wiki uses simple text codes for formatting. The approach is similar to that used in writing HTML for web pages, but the codes are simpler.

The wiki can accept some html tags directly, but most people use the built-in wiki markup language, which is designed for ease of editing. The Wiki markup is unique to the wiki software.

Bold and italics

The most commonly used wiki tags are bold and italics. Bolding and italicizing is done by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes ('); not quotes ("):

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

Using italics, bold, or both, depends largley on the user, but some things are set in strone by the conventions set forth by this wiki. One of the Battlestar Wiki conventions is to italicize ship names also. For example, the article about Colonial One starts off with the text:

Colonial One is the passenger liner starship on which President Laura Roslin resides and where she sets up her new seat of government in the refugee fleet led by the battlestar Galactica.

The code looks like so:

'''''Colonial One''''' is the passenger liner starship on which President [[Laura Roslin]] resides and where she sets up her new seat of government in the [[The Fleet (RDM)|refugee fleet]] led by the battlestar ''[[Galactica (RDM)|Galactica]]''.

Colonial One has both because it is a ship name and it's the first use of the article name. Galactica is only italicized because it's a ship name (but not the name of the article). There are many other examples on when and where this wiki code is used. Just click on here for a random page to see other pages.

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:

==Top level heading== (2 equals signs)
===Subheading=== (3 equals signs)
====Another level down==== (4 equals signs)
=====Another level down===== (5 equals signs)

If an article has at least three headings, a table of contents will be automatically generated. Try creating a heading in this page's sandbox. It will be automatically added to the table of contents for the page. There are certain items that will disable and manipulate the TOC. They can be read on the BW:MARK page.