Tutorial/Source vs Visual editor

<< Return to Tutorial

On the wiki there are two buttons for editing a page. The one that simply says "Edit" is the visual editor, and the "Edit source" button is the source editor. So what's the difference between the two and which one should you use? That's what this article is here to explain.

Visual editor

The visual editor acts like a word processor for wiki pages; it's a "what you see is what you get" editor. You can write text, add links, apply formatting, and more all while looking at a preview of what you're making.

Source editor

In the source editor, you edit the raw wikitext of the page. Wiki pages are stored using a special markup language called wikitext, and using the source editor gives you more control over that. The source editor has an option to enable syntax highlighting if you would like to see some sort of preview of what you're writing

Wikitext

Basic markup

To start, you can surround text with apostrophes to make them bold or italic. ''Italic'' text can be done with two apostrophes, '''bold''' text takes three, and '''''five''''' apostrophes makes text bold and italic. Headings can be created using equal signs; the number of equals determines the level of the heading. Two equals sings creates a == level two heading == which is usually what you'll want to use for major section headers.

Bullet lists can be created with *s at the start of a line. Here's an example usage:

* List item 1
*You can put a space after the asterisk or not, it doesn't really matter to the parser.
* [[You]] can put ''markup'' in here '''too'''.
** Two asterisks create an indented list item
***Three indent it even more.
**** You can put as many as you want
** You can return to any level at any point

Output:

• List item 1
• You can put a space after the asterisk or not, it doesn't really matter to the parser.
• You can put markup in here too.
  • Two asterisks create an indented list item
    • Three indent it even more.
      • You can put as many as you want
  • You can return to any level at any point

The same also works with #s to create numbered lists.

1. List item 1
2. You can put a space after the asterisk or not, it doesn't really matter to the parser.
   1. You can put markup in here too and indent them by putting multiple #s.
3. etc.

Links

Links to other pages on the wiki can be added simply with two nested square brackets [[like this]]. If you would like the displayed text to be different from the link destination, simply separate them with a pipe (|) [[link destination|link text]]. For some situations, you can get away with using this: [[doggo]]s. This takes less typing than using a pipe and displays like this: doggos with the s included in the link text, but not the destination.
(could probably explain this better)

When linking to a category, it adds that category to the page. If you would link to have that be the link destination, put a colon before it link [[:Category:Moral dilemmas]] which displays as Category:Moral dilemmas.