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.
This page explains Mediawiki markup. Mediawiki is the software behind not only Camera-wiki.org but also Wikipedia (for which it was created) and many other wikis; you may find what follows familiar from one of these. And if you happen to be used to HTML or XHTML, the explanation will be easy to follow, as Mediawiki is a preprocessor for XHTML and its markup is thus similar.
Contents
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 "<" and ">" 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 either:
- copy them from elsewhere and paste them
- insert them via the "numeric references" (eg "ō" for "ō") or named "character entities" (eg "ü" 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 within a paragraph, list item, etc, can be altered via either Mediawiki-specific use of apostrophes[1] 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. |
And yes, you can combine italics and bold.
Secondly, the XHTML tags. You mark the start of an area needing some change with "<XXX>" and you mark its end with "</XXX>" -- though not with "XXX" but instead with something else, as explained below:
| What it looks like | What you type | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Superscript: marketed as the "330D" in Europe | marketed as the "330<sup>D</sup>" in Europe |
|
| Subscript: marketed as the "A41" in Japan | marketed as the "<sub>A</sub>41" in Japan |
|
| Small: [not verified] | <small>[not verified]</small> |
Rarely helpful in the text of an article. |
(Editors familiar with CSS can also format within <span style="[CSS rules]"> and </span>.)
Notes
- ↑ These must be standard, straight-from-the-keyboard apostrophes: ' . "Typographic quotes" — opening- and closing-specific quotation marks ‘ and ’ — won't work for this.
