Tutorial:Making elementary text entries

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Basics of Wiki Markup

Mediawiki based websites such as Wikipedia work with a language called Wiki Markup. This language was invented specially to make creating and editing web-pages easy for the common people like us, who do not want to get our hands dirty with learning computer languages. It is a really simple language which makes hyperlinking easy. Hyperlinking is nothing but linking one word in one article to another article somewhere outside. For example, lets say I want to type the following:

Bill Gates owns Microsoft

But I want the people reading this, who dont know much about Bill Gates and who dont know much about Microsoft, to be able to go to the proper article for knowing that. Something like this:

Bill Gates owns Microsoft.

The words in blue are now hyper-linked to their corresponding pages in Wikipedia. How did I do that? The simplest way to hyper-link a word is by adding square brackets around the word. Something like this:

[[Bill Gates]] owns [[Microsoft]]

Now this would be fine if we had the pages named Bill Gates and Microsoft in THIS database. But they are not. They are present on Wikipedia. So, if you just typed as above, it would show you this:

Bill Gates owns Microsoft

The red color indicates that those links are broken...there are no pages "Bill Gates" and "Microsoft" in the Brahma database. For pages which have their entries in this database (eg: Azolla pinnata, Indian Banyan) you could just put a square bracket around the word and you will be done. Like this:

[[Azolla pinnata]]
[[Indian Banyan]]

But how would you know which entry is present? The trick is to just put a round bracket and see if the word shows up as red or blue when you "Preview" your writeup. If you see it red, you should probably link it to Wikipedia or REDIRECT it.

Linking to Wikipedia

For the above example, this is how you link to a wikipedia entry

[[w:Bill Gates|Bill Gates]] owns [[w:Microsoft|Microsoft]].

The first (w:) tells the program to link that word to Wikipedia. The first (Bill Gates) after the (w:) tells the program to link the word after the (|) to that entry on Wikipedia. Notice what happens when I type:

Case 1: [[w:Steve Jobs|Bill Gates]]  (this will link to entry "Steve Jobs" on Wikipedia)
Case 2: [[w:Indian Ocean|Bill Gates]]  (this will link to entry "Indian Ocean" on Wikipedia)
Case 3: [[w:Landmines|Bill Gates]]  (this will link to entry "Landmines" on Wikipedia)

Case 1: Bill Gates

Case 2: Bill Gates

Case 3: Bill Gates

So tomorrow, if you want to create a link to the word "Pterodiphyte" to Wikipedia, you'd type it as:

[[w:pteridophyte|Pteridophye]]

If you wanted to link the word "Pteridophyte" to the entry on "Fern", you'd type it as:

[[w:fern|Pteridophyte]]

Not too bad, right? Its as easy as that. Such links - between this database and Wikipedia - are called Interwiki links. Such links are very powerful. They help you make your database as inter-connected as Wikipedia with minimal efforts.