Pages on OpenWiki are written in wikitext, a lightweight markup designed to stay readable as plain text. This page is the complete reference. The fastest way to learn it is to open the Edit tab on any article and read the source of something you like.
| You type | You get |
|---|---|
| ''italic'' | italic |
| '''bold''' | bold |
| '''''both''''' | both |
| <code>code</code> | code |
| <nowiki>markup shown literally</nowiki> | markup shown literally |
Leave a blank line between paragraphs. A single newline is ignored, so you can wrap long lines however you like.
Headings create the structure of an article and the table of contents in the sidebar:
== Section == === Subsection === ==== Sub-subsection ====
Do not use a single =: the article title is already the top-level heading.
A link to a page that does not exist yet shows in red. Clicking it opens the editor to create that page. This is how most articles begin. See Special:WantedPages for the ones people are waiting for.
* bullet ** nested bullet # numbered ## nested number ; term : definition
Put the source inside <ref>...</ref> where the claim is made, and place <references /> under a "References" heading at the bottom:
The Analytical Engine was never built.<ref>Hodges, ''Alan Turing: The Enigma'', 1983.</ref> == References == <references />
Footnote numbers are generated automatically, and each one links back to the point in the text where it was used.
{| class="wikitable"
! Header !! Header
|-
| cell || cell
|-
| cell || cell
|}Images are referenced by URL. Any image on the web can be used:
[[File:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Jupiter%20and%20its%20shrunken%20Great%20Red%20Spot.jpg?width=320|thumb|right|240px|A caption]]
A file served from this wiki, if you put one under /static/, is given by its path instead:
[[File:/static/media/diagram.svg|thumb|right|300px|A local file]]
Both http:// and https:// addresses are accepted, as are protocol-relative ones beginning //. Anything else, including javascript: and data:, is ignored rather than rendered, so a link cannot be used to smuggle code into a page.
The options, in any order after the address, are:
| Option | Effect |
|---|---|
thumb | A framed thumbnail with the caption beneath it. The default. |
plain | The image alone, with no frame. Used inside infoboxes. |
frameless | A small inline image, sized to the line of text. |
left, right, center | Where the image floats. right is the default. |
240px | Display width in pixels. |
| anything else | The caption, and the image's alt text. |
An image loaded from another site is fetched by the reader's browser directly from that site, so:
referrerpolicy="no-referrer", so the other site is not told which article the reader was on.The articles here use images from Wikimedia Commons, which are freely licensed. Credit the source in the caption when you add one.
A template is a page in the Template: namespace whose content is inserted wherever it is called. {{Stub}} inserts Template:Stub. Templates take named parameters:
{{Infobox
| title = Jupiter
| image = /static/media/jupiter.svg
| label1 = Mean radius
| data1 = 69,911 km
}}Available templates include Template:Infobox, Template:Hatnote, Template:About, Template:Main, Template:Quote, Template:Stub and Template:Cite.
Add [[Category:Biology]] at the bottom of a page to file it. Categories are listed in a box under the article and indexed at Special:Categories.
To point one title at another, make the entire page:
#REDIRECT [[Target page]]