Wiki Text FormattingOverviewThis wiki employs a simple text formatting convention that is designed to make the creation of wiki pages faster and easier than ordinary HTML web pages. For those of you familiar with structured markup systems (such as HTML or LaTeX) learning wiki markup should be a snap. If you aren't familiar with structured markup, the central idea is this: what you edit (the source text) gets transformed into what you see (the web page) using a simple set of rules that relate to the structure of the document.
The RulesThe rules used by this wiki are an extension of (and generally compatible with) Ward Cunningham's original wiki wiki text formatting system (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki). Though occasionally strange, these rules are intended to be easy to use and compatible with ordinary English spelling and punctuation. As a result, most wiki source text looks just like plain English text without any special formatting at all. Many of the following examples won't make sense unless you are looking at the wiki page source text. You can view the source text at any time by clicking the Edit This Page link at the left, or by clicking on the following link: Edit WikiTextFormatting.
Ordinary TextIf all you do is type in ordinarily punctuated English text, the wiki is guaranteed to render it in a reasonable way. If you want to add paragraph breaks or other formatting, read on.
Paragraphs and Paragraph BreaksA paragraph is one or more consecutive lines of text. Paragraphs are ended by adding a blank (empty) line at the end of the paragraph. These blank lines are translated into paragraph breaks
Wiki Page Links
Mixed Case TitlesA link to a wiki page is automatically created wherever the title of that page occures in wiki source text. For example, the title of the "recent changes" page is RecentChanges; this text becomes a link to the page. Wiki page titles are distinguished from other words by the MixedCaseConvention. Any word obeying the MixedCaseConvention is automatically considered a page title, even if that page doesn't yet exist. If the page doesn't exist, as in the case of PleaseDoNotClickOnThisLink, the title is shown with a question mark after it. (Please don't click on this link so we can keep using it as an example).
Creating New PagesYou create a new wiki page by typing its title and then clicking on the question mark link. Be sure that you like the title — it is the one thing you can't change about a page once it is created.
URLs and ReferencesURLs, such as http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables, are automatically translated into in-page links. You can also add wiki references, which look a bit like journal citations. For instance [1] is a reference to the same URL that was inlined above. References that link to images will result in the linked images being inserted into the page. In this case the reference is no longer a hyperlink, but the thing itself. For instance, the URL http://mithril.ws/mithril-web.gif as a reference (number two in this document) is rendered like this:
You can edit the references when you edit the page source text and click on the EditLinks link.
ListsBulleted and numbered list items are created by starting a one-line paragraph with a tab character followed by either an asterisk (*) for bulleted items or the number one (1) for numbered items. For example:
Alternative Tab ConventionMany browsers have problems allowing you to type tab characters in text fields. If you are using IE or Mozilla (or a number of other browsers that have this limitation) you can replace the tab with the sequence = = >, but without the spaces between these characters (<equal><equal><greater than>). This will be replaced by a single tab when the wiki formats the page. Thus, the following list looks just like the one above, but is easier to type:
Old Space-To-Tab Conversion ConventionThe wiki script also supports an automatic conversion of leading whitespace characters ( ) to tabs if you check the ConvertSpacesToTabs box at the bottom of the editing form before you save the text. (The wiki will treat three to eight consecutive spaces as a single tab in this case.)
EmphasisYou can add emphasis to text, making it italic or bold. You create italics by surrounding the text with two single quote (') characters, bold with three.
HeadingsHeadings are created using double hash (#) characters followed by a number (1-5) to indicate the depth of the heading, followed by the heading text, followed by two more hash characters. e.g. ##n heading text ## Would produce a heading of depth n, were n replace by a number.
Line Breaks
Occasionally you may want to force the
wiki to break a line in a particular
place; this can be accomplished by a double
backward slash (\) sequence, e.g. \ \
would cause a
Indented TextIndented text, such as is commonly used for block quotations or to set off a paragraph from surrounding text, may be created by starting a single-line paragraph with <tab><space>:<tab>, which is to say a tab followed by a space, a colon, and another tab. (an example follows)
HTML MarkupMost HTML will be automatically "escaped" and rendered as plain text. I have added support for a few HTML tags, but as a matter of style using HTML markup is discouraged unless absolutely necessary. Examples of allowed HTML include anchors, the IMG tag, tables, the font tag, and a few other odds and ends. These proper use of these tags can significantly improve the structure and rendering of a wiki page, but bad HTML can easily break a wiki page and prevent it from rendering at all. One consequence is that you can freely use the < and > characters in source text without worrying about the < and > escape sequences.
Other Typographic MarkupThis wiki supports other typographic rendering styles not described above. Please view the source of this page to see how these examples work: larger text
A paragraph of monospacing text, created by starting each line with leading non-syntactic whitespace. (such as a single space character)Multi-paragraph and in-line monospacing text can be created by surrounding the text with double curly braces. All of these formatting tricks can be combined, as in the following example:
Page InclusionsAn advanced feature of this wiki is page inclusions — you can insert the contents of another wiki page inline just as though it were part of the original page. For example, if I wanted to insert the contents of the DoctorHeadCrash page, I could do so by enclosing the name in double parentheses, e.g. ( ( DoctorHeadCrash ) ), but without the extra spaces between the parens. All of the text following the horizontal rule is actually the contents of another page, DoctorHeadCrash:
Head CrashOk, so I run this wiki thing. And I recently joined the ScUl chopper bike gang. And I put up this semi-lame ScUl page, and Asher wrote on it, and PilotSmasher wrote some stuff (or someone else did) and the ball seems to be rolling.
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