Willipedia:FAQ

How do I ask questions about Willipedia?

Email <email>wiki@wso.williams.edu</email> to contact the Willipedia board, which will answer your question promptly and may place it here. Alternately, you may add your question to this page if you think seeing the answer is in the interest of the public, and the board or another user may answer it.

General questions

How do I add a page?

To add a page, you must first link it from another page. The first thing to do is to search the wiki for the term you want to be the title of your page; if it already exists, you can put double square brackets around the word, and then click Save page at the bottom, and then you will see the text of your title in red on the preexisting page. Click on that, and edit away; now you have your new page. In general, go to an existing page that is related to the page you want to add. Put in something about the page you want to add, including the exact title of the page you want to create, and put that in square brackets. Then do as above.

How do I delete a page?

You don't. You can edit a page, you can even delete all the text on a page, but general users cannot delete a page because deleting a page removes all of that pages edit history, which makes reversion or further improvement of that page impossible. Where possible, we should improve pages rather than annihilate them in this way. Currently, only members of the Willipedia board have the power to delete, and use it sparingly. If you think a page should be deleted, you can delete all the text on the page and put the word delete within two sets of curly brackets.

Formatting questions

For a more exhaustive list, see Editing help.

I left lines between paragraphs of text, but my text is showing up as one big block. How do I fix it?

To make the wiki recognize single carraige returns, preface each paragraph (or each line, in a poem) with a colon, like this :Hi.

How do I make something bold or italicized?

Italicized text has two single quotes (') around it. Bold text has three.

How do I offset a block of text, like a long quotation from another source?

At the beginning of the text block, put <blockquote>. At the end, put </blockquote>. If the text block has multiple paragraphs, do this for each paragraph, or use colons as described above.

What if I want to format something and the answer isn't here?

Go to a page that has the formatting you want, click on "Edit page," and see how it works there. Then click "back" so you don't change anything about the page. If you think many people would like to know the answer, add it to this section.