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Formatting articles is a bit different from writing on a standard word processor. Instead of a strict ("what you see is what you get") approach, mediawiki uses text codes to create particular elements of the page (e.g. headings). This "language" is known as Wikitext (or Wiki-markup) and is designed for ease of editing.

Bold and italics

The most commonly used wiki tags are bold and italics. Bolding and italicizing are done by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes ('):

You type	You get
''italic''	italic
'''bold'''	bold
'''''bold italic'''''	bold italic

On the Wiki, the names of an article's subject are written in bold when they are first mentioned in the article.

Italics may be used for the names of books, movies, albums, and computer/video game titles. If the first mention of the subject of an article is also a book or movie title then bold italics is used.

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 the article by inserting a heading for each section.

Headings can be created like this:

You type	You get
== Heading ==	Heading
=== Subheading ===	Subheading

If an article has at least four headings, a table of contents will automatically be generated.

Don't skip levels, like from two to four equals signs. Start with 2 equals signs not 1 because 1 creates H1 tags which should be reserved for page title.

Lists

In order to format a list, you must first know if you wish to create a unordered (bullets) list or a numbered list.

To create unordered lists, use an asterisk (*). More asterisks in front of a paragraph means more indentation. To create numbered lists, use the number sign or octothorpe (#). Again, you can affect the indent of the number by the number of #s you use.

Lists can be created like this:

You type	You get
* One * Two ** Two point one * Three	One Two Two point one Three
# One # Two ## Two point one # Three	One Two Two point one Three

Links

Internal Links

Linking articles together is very important. These easily created links allow users to access information related to the article they are reading and greatly add to the wiki's utility.

Adding links to an article makes it more useful, but too many links can be distracting. This is why you should only link the first occurrence of a word.

To make a link to another Wiki page (called a wiki link), put it in double square brackets, like this:

[[Main Page]] = Main Page

If you want to link to an article, but display some other text for the link, you can do so by adding the pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and other keyboards) followed by the alternative name. For example:

[[Target page|display text]] = display text

You can make a link to a specific section of a page like so:

[[Target page#Target section|display text]] = display text

External Links

External links are beneficial to an article when there is information residing outside of the wiki that relates to the subject. External links are general placed in a separate section, unless referenced to within the text of the article.

To create an external link, simply put the full URL in single brackets followed by a space and then the name of the link, like this:

[http://www.google.com Google.com] = Google.com

Linking to an article on Wikipedia is much simpler, and works similar to an internal link. To link a Wikipedia article, simply put the Wikipedia article name in double brackets, preceded by "Wikipedia:". It works like this:

[[Wikipedia:Main Page]] = Wikipedia:Main Page

HTML

HTML code can be used in pages to produce more advanced formatting such as colors, tables, and edit page layout. However, you do not need to know HTML to use the wiki and follow formatting conventions.

More

See Wikipedia:How to edit a page or the Wikipedia:Cheatsheet for more on editing a page.