Help:Editing shortcuts

This is a copy of the master help page at m:Help:Editing shortcuts. Do not edit this page. Edits will be lost in the next update from the master page. Either edit the master help page for all projects at Meta, or edit the project-specific text at Template:Ph:Editing shortcuts. You are welcome to copy the exact wikitext from the master page at Meta and paste it into this page at any time.

Edit editor toc view this alone

Editing overview

Starting a new page

Page name

Referencing

Formatting

Organizing

Fixing mistakes and vandalism

Saving effort

Communicating

Special characters

Extensions

WikiHiero syntax — warning: lots of images! (for Egyptian hieroglyphs)
EasyTimeline syntax

Frequently Asked Questions

There are three categories of automatic conversion of wikitext:

In a preview, the rendering of the result already shows up in the preview itself, but the conversion is not yet shown in the edit box (save and press Edit again to see the result of the conversion in the edit box, and to edit it):
- ~~~~ produces e.g. Patrick 10:58, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC). This is a piped link to the user page and the UTC time and date, for use on talk pages. The date format is in accordance with the preferences of the user concerned, at the time of saving the page, independent of the preferences of the reader.
  
  An alternative link label (nickname) can be set in the User Data section of the preferences. The feature can even be used to create an additional link to the user talk page, etc. See also w:Wikipedia:Sign your posts on talk pages and Help:Editing#Links, URLs.
  - Additionally, there are:
    - ~~~ giving Patrick
    - ~~~~~ giving 08:41, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
- subst, see Help:Template#subst
- see Piped link
In a preview, the conversion is not yet shown at all:
- extra lines of text (not extra text on the same line) after a redirect are automatically deleted
In a preview, the conversion is already shown, even in the edit box:
- in MediaWiki projects which use ISO-8859-1 character encoding, special characters that are not available in the limited character set are automatically converted to their decimal numeric codes on Preview or Save.
- in the Esperanto Wikipedia, a character like Ŝ is automatically converted into the alternative notation Sx, because in some browsers it may not display in the edit box, even if it displays in the webpage (and Sx, whether resulting from this conversion or just typed, is rendered as Ŝ)

As opposed to rendering matters (what webpage results from given wikitext), these conversions are not demonstrated in looking at existing wikitext and webpages: the wikitext only shows the result, not how it was entered.

It also means that when testing these features, one has to remember or record what one has entered.