Help:Editing

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Reason: This article is a stub. (Discuss in Help talk:Editing#)
Please consult the pedia article metapage for guidelines on contributing.

Article tone

Use a more descriptive tone, where concepts and instructions are described and explained first. A prescriptive tone should be avoided. Here's an example:

Prescriptive	Descriptive
How to deal with full /boot in case of EFI systemd-boot (gummiboot) can't store kernels, initrd and other big stuff on root partition, so switch to grub	Keeping kernels/initrd on the main partition For these instructions, GRUB will be required; systemd-boot cannot reference boot files from the root partition. This will differ from the default expectation of NixOS on EFI, where /boot/ is the ESP.

On the prescriptive side, the title doesn't describe the achieved end-result; the text tells the reader to switch to grub without explaining what the following (elided) configuration does.

Titles

Capitalize only the first word.

Common sections

Some sections are common across the wiki. For consistency, their names are documented here.

Section	Description
See also	References inside and outside the wiki. Prefer textual links with a description than naked URLs.
References	The last section, when needed, where sections will output the references.

Code

Inline code can be typeset with {{ic|...}} or <code>...</code>. A block of code is obtained with:

{{bc|...}}

or

<pre>...</pre>

or, often preferable:

<syntaxhighlight lang="...">...</syntaxhighlight>

See mediawikiwiki:Extension:SyntaxHighlight for help.

Examples of lang="..."

• lang="nix" can be used to highlight Nix expressions.
• lang="html+handlebars" may be used to highlight wikitext.
• For console snippets use lang="console". root prompts are conventionally indicated with #, while non-root prompts look like $. lang="console" highlights such prompts correctly, while lang="bash" treats # as the beginning of a comment, as it is intended for scripts.

References

aka citations

This wiki uses the widely used mediawikiwiki:Extension:Cite for handling footnotes. It provides the tags

• <ref>

  begin a reference (citation),

• </ref>

  end a reference (citation) and

• <references />

  list all references (citations).

Much more information is available at mediawikiwiki:Help:Cite.

See also

• mediawikiwiki:Help:Formatting, the upstream documentation.
• wikibooks:Editing Wikitext, a book about editing wikitext.
• mediawikiwiki:Help:Section. While about the wikimedia wikis, these documents may help with some peculiarities about mediawiki.
• mediawikiwiki:Category:Pages with syntax highlighting errors, which describes several common syntax highlighting mistakes.