Help:Editing

All you need to know about editing a wiki. Well, maybe not all, perhaps not even a lot. But a little bit at least.

Formatting

See the MediaWiki documentation.

Style and Page Structure

Use simple words!

Remember that the reader does not know what you know and is not likely to understand fancy "tech talk". An ideal wiki article is easily understood by a ninety year old bloke who has never used his computer for anything but checking his bank account balance and watching pictures of his great-grandchildren and by a six year old school child who has barely learned how to read. That ideal is impossible of course but try your best!

There are some cases when this advice doesn't really apply, such as detailed software documentation, but even in those cases it's important to keep the info as accessible as possible.

Start with a summary

Take a look at any wikipedia article. They always start with a short paragpraph, maybe only a sentence or two, suming up the most important info on the topic.

Focus on one topic

Different topics need separate pages. It's obvious but easy to forget.

Use paragraphs and hiearchial headers

Nobody is ever going to read that huge chunk of unformatted text you just dumped onto a page.

Consider page length

There is no hard rule here but no matter how well a page is structured, the longer the text is, the harder the info is to find and comprehend. Maybe it's better to split the content into several pages?

Try to avoid duplicate content

This is mainly for the benefit of other editors. If the same info is posted on several pages, there is a good chance one or more of the pages are overlooked if/when the info needs to be updated. Better to interlink.