Basic Text Formatting

Media

A welcome message from Nicholas Nicholos Kimolo from Nairobi, Kenya talks about the FLOSS4Edu project and the importance of free content for Africa. African educators are using WikiEducator to build capacity through collaborative content development. In this welcome message, Nicholas will introduce the skills that are covered in this tutorial. Click on the audio link below to start the download of the audio file. Not recommended for dialup connections! (Note: If you're using a low bandwidth connection to the Internet skip the audio message and arrange for an off line version of the multimedia files).

Colleagues from Malta and Namibia discussing text formatting alternatives for a learning activity in WikiEducator

Now that you have made your first edit to your User page we will look at some of the basic formatting features available to you on the wiki.

Two ways to format text

WikiEducator uses a kind of simple text markup to format particular elements of the page (e.g. bold, italics, headings, etc). This "language" is known as Wikitext (or Wiki-markup) and is designed for ease of editing.

Much of this simple formatting can be added to your content by: (1)using the Editing Toolbar that appears while you are in editing mode and / or (2) typing the syntax by hand.

Note that the entire set of wiki formatting options are not available on the Editing Toolbar, so you will need to learn how to enter some of this syntax by hand. This will be useful information for more sophisticated formatting options (and devices) that will be dealt with in later / advanced tutorials.

Creating your own practice area

Don't skip this activity
The very first thing we need to do is to create a personal practice area for all your edits. We call this a sandbox, do please move onto the next section: Creating a sandbox (before proceeding with this tutorial).