Mini Lesson 3: Basic Text Formatting

Objectives

At the end of this mini lesson you will be able to: use wiki syntax and / or the editing toolbar to bold and italicise text use wiki syntax to add headings and subheadings use wiki syntax to create bulleted and numbered lists

Key points

To format text, you must be in the editing mode. Not all the formatting options are accessible through the Editing toolbar, so you’ll need to learn how to enter some syntax manually.

Activity

Creating your own personal Sandbox area to practise basic wiki skills Go to your User page. Click the “Edit” tab to activate the edit mode. Type this be hitting on the corresponding keys on your keyboard: double square open brackets, slash, My sandbox, slash, close square brackets. Click on the “Save” page button at the bottom of the page. If you have done this correctly, you will see a link in red text: “My sandbox”. You have just created a new page from your User page called “My sandbox”. It appears red because no content has been written on the page as yet. Click on this link and enter some text, e.g. “Content coming soon...” Click the “Save” page button. The “My sandbox” link now appears blue because you have just written something on the new page.

Activity

Using the editing toolbar to format text Go to the sandbox you have created on your User page. Click the “Edit” tab to activate the edit mode. Type the following sentence or something similar: “This word is bold and this word is italics.” Highlight the word you want to appear in bold and click on the Bold button on the editing toolbar. Highlight the word you want to appear in italics and click on the italics button. Observe the wiki syntax that is automatically created. Click the “Save page” button or “Show preview” button to view the published view of the formatting. Now take a few moments to look at your Wikipedia Cheatsheet.

Activity

Using wiki syntax to format text Go to the sandbox you have created on your User page. Click the “Edit” tab to activate the edit mode. Create some content to practice using the various wiki text shown on the Cheat Sheet Save all changes.

Activity

Refining your User page Use the skills you have learned in the previous mini lessons to improve the structure, layout, formatting and content of your User page.