Help:Markup reference

This may eventually grow into something worth moving into a new "Help:" ... but it has a hell of a long way to go first.

In this page you'll learn about Mediawiki markup. Mediawiki is the software behind Wikipedia (for which it was created), Camera-wiki.org, and many other wikis; you may find what follows familiar from one of these. And if you're used to HTML or XHTML, what the explanation will be easy to follow, as Mediawiki is a preprocessor for XHTML and its markup is thus similar.

Characters

Characters on your keyboard

You should be able to type just about any character that's on your keyboard, and in the normal way. Exceptions are:

• combinations of characters that most people would never want (such as pairs of single quotation marks)
• the two inequality signs "<" and ">"

The last pair will seldom be useful in the context of cameras; but if you do need them, type "&lt;" and "&gt;" respectively. (Mnemonics: "lt" and "gt" for "less than" and "greater than" respectively.)

Characters not on your keyboard

As for all the characters that aren't on most people's keyboards and that are occasionally useful — áàäâāăãåą and more — you can choose between:

• copying them from elsewhere and pasting them
• inserting them via the "numeric references" (eg "&#333;" for "ō") or named "character entities" (eg "&uuml;" for "ü") that are standard for HTML or XHTML in regular web pages

Many web resources help with the latter; one of these is Alan Wood’s Unicode resources.

Text formatting

The way that text appears can be altered via either Mediawiki-specific use of apostrophes or certain XHTML tags. First, the apostrophes:

What it looks like	What you type	Comments
Italics: Asahi Camera is helpful	''Asahi Camera'' is helpful	Two (plain) apostrophes to start, two to finish.
Bold: It is marked SP	It is marked '''SP'''	Three (plain) apostrophes to start, three to finish.
Bold italics: It is marked SP	It is marked '''''SP'''''	Five (plain) apostrophes to start, five to finish.