Want to create pages? Want to be awesome, like me? It's not as hard as it seems, brosef!

Basic Formatting

If you look at any properly done Wikipedia article you'll see that the information is carefully arranged into sections. This is the best way to keep information organized and useful for a reader. Luckily it's not difficult to use, either from the beginning or when renovating an article.

The Table of Contents

A properly utilized Table of Contents will help you keep your article organized and clean. Adding one to a page is quite simple. From the edit page, click the "Insert Plugin" icon. It will pop up a small window. Mouse over "Page Info" and select "Table of Contents". Hit next a couple of times (you don't need to bother changing settings), and it will drop a little green box into your edit window. This is where the Table of Contents will reside on your page. You don't need to worry about manually filling in the information because it will automatically update. You just have to use headers to tell it what to update with.

Headers and You

If you look to the toolbar at the top of the editing window, you'll see a little dropdown that typically says "Normal". This is how you create section headers like the one just above, and these section headers will automatically be updated in the Table of Contents. Add your title before each section of text, and then highlight it. Then go to that dropdown and choose your heading size. You can see an example of how that works on this page: the "Basic Formatting" is set as Heading 1, while "The Table of Contents" and "Headers and You" are Heading 2.  Do you see in the Table of Contents how these Heading 2 sections are treated as subsections? It does that automatically for you.

Please Use Tags

On the upper right of every article you'll see a list of "Tags" to which the page is assigned. Tags are simply a way to keep several articles grouped together for easy reference. For instance, this page is tagged with "tips". If you click that tag, you'll get a listing of all of the other pages tagged as "tips". This is helpful for users who need to find other articles with similar information, but it is also useful for admins and contributors to the site. We can tag items as "needs work" for articles that aren't up to snuff, or as "outdated" or "archived" for conventions from years past, if we need to maintain old data.

Tagging your article is simple, and important. At the bottom of the editing page you'll see a small link titled "Edit Tags". When you click that it will switch to an edit mode. It lists all of the currently used tags to make it easier on you: just click the ones you think are appropriate and it adds them. From here you can also add your own tags, separated by a comma. When you save the page, it will automatically updated the tag lists.

Please Use Correct Tags

Tags are very useful but they only remain useful as articles get correctly tagged. For instance, if you label an article about the Red Cross Blood Drive as "parking", that doesn't help anyone. This is part of a concept called "garbage in, garbage out," or "GIGO". If you screw up the tags, then they stop helping us organize articles.

When you tag your article please be sure you're using appropriate tags. If you're creating a new tag, try to make sure there's nothing else already serving that purpose (for instance, as I type this there are tags for "programming" and "programming tracks", which are the same thing... we'll have to decide which to remove). But with that said, don't be shy about creating new ones if there's a genuine use for them.