Help:VisualEditor

Introduction

This tutorial is intended to give you an introduction to creating and editing content using the VisualEditor plugin for mediawiki. A example page for you to view is shown here User:Sample user

Creating or editing a new page

Exercise - creating a personal page

Step 1

Login to the wiki and in the top right hand corner click on your username. You can experiment with creating and editing content on your own page. Once you are comfortable editing you can create your own resource page that you can access anywhere on the Dell corporate network. There is no much to actually formatting and typing a page in the wiki, much of the work tends to go into research and gathering information to create content.

Step 2

Select Create or Edit to bring up the VisualEditor, alternatively you can click on Create source or Edit source if you want to manually enter the Wikimedia tags used to format the text. There are not many tag and once you get proficient with this you will find it is often quicker just to choose edit source and make the changes you want.

Step 3

You are presented with a menu bar that has the options for formatting the text for your content on the left side and save and other options on the right.

Creating a page with new content

In mediawiki when you want to create new content you type the title of the page you want to create into the search page and look to see if similar or duplicate content already exists. If there is duplicate content then you must edit the existing page and update it with new or additional relevant information. If the article does not exist then go ahead and click on the title of the article and populate it with your content.

 

Tip:   

Do not use the full stop <.> at the end of a description as you will have problems linking to it later on

Saving your work

It is important to save your work from time to time, there is no autosave in mediawiki so if the browser crashes while you are typing or you get distracted and forget to save your work, you have to start again. To save you content click on Save in the top right hand corner. You then summarise the changes you made and click save to commit the content.

Dividing the content using headings

Mediawiki allows you to divide a page using headings and sub headings. Once there are four or more headings on a page Wikimedia will automatically create a table of contents on the top of each page that serves as a useful method to navigate directly to the content you are looking for.

Headings exercise

Step 1.

Either copy and paste of type the following lines to the page you are editing

My links

Useful content

Dell Storage PS Series

Dell Storage SC Series

Dell Links

Reference

Step 2.

Put the cursor in front of the line My links and select heading from the menu bar as shown.

Repeat the process to enter a heading for each of the following:

Useful content

Dell Links

Reference

Step 3 - Creating a Sub Heading

Place the cursor in front of Dell Storage PS Series and Dell Storage SC Series in turn and select sub heading 1 for each.

Step 5 - Save your work and observe how the page appears.

Inserting hyperlinks

Exercise - inserting hyperlink to an external web site

Step 1

Click on edit next to the My links heading

Step 2

Type or copy and paste the following line:

The most useful start point for Cherrywood technical support technicians is the local intranet page.

Step 3

Highlight the text local intranet page and click on the icon for hyperlink. File:Editwiki20.png and copy or type the following url to the dialog box - http://intranet.dell.com/ts/dubtechsp/Pages/Default.aspx

Step 4

Click done. There is another dialog presented just press ESCape to clear this or edit if you need to change it.

Exercise - Inserting links to pages within the mediawiki

Step 1

Type or copy the following text:

 EqualLogic is now marketed as Dell Storage PS series. Here are some regular links I use 
 What does the health status on a controller module mean? 
 How to troubleshoot an unexpected controller restart. 

Step 2

Highlight the text unexpected controller restart and click the hyperlink icon File:Editwiki20.png

Step 3

Clear the text that appears in the dialog and start typing unexpect, a link titled with unexpected controller restart will appear which is the title of an existing page. Select this and click done.

Highlighting words with bold text

Select the text you want to emphasise, click on the A icon and select bold

Inserting an image

You can upload image, PDF and DOC files by selecting the Upload file option on the left hand side.

Exercise - displaying an image on your page

This exercise will take you through inserting an a previously uploaded image in your page using VisualEditor.

Step 1

Move the cursor to a new line on the page.

Step 2

Clink Insert and select Media

Step 3

Clear the text that is there and type the following filename (case sensitive)- loonytunes.png

Step 4

Click Use this image.

Step 5

First type a caption for the image and then click on advanced settings so you can position the image on the page.

Step 6

Seclect Left, then Frameless and then Insert.

Don't forget to save your work

Manually creating a page page

This is the menu bar if you click edit source, there are some icon objects to help you format text and you may prefer it.

If you are to manually insert the tags shown in User:Sample_user this is what you would do.

This is a tutorial to show you the basics of creating and editing a wiki page.  

In this example you will create a four headings

Then under each heading you will insert hyper-links to internal and external content.

You will highlight some text in bold.

Then create a list with hyperlinks.

Finally display an image on the page.

== My links ==
The most useful start point for Cherrywood technical support technicians is the [http://intranet.dell.com/ts/dubtechsp/Pages/Default.aspx local intranet page].

== Useful content ==

=== Dell Storage PS Series ===
EqualLogic is now marketed as '''Dell Storage PS series'''.  Here are some regular links I use

What does the [[Healthstatus|health status]] on a controller module mean?

How to [[Unexpected controller restart|troubleshoot an unexpected controller restart]].

=== Dell Storage SC Series ===
Compellent is marketed as SC Storage Series

== Dell Links ==
* [https://delta-emea.lim.emea.dell.com/callcenter_enu/start.swe?SWECmd=Login&SWECM=S&SRN= Delta (EMEA)]
* [https://isp.us.dell.com/callcenter_enu/start.swe?SWECmd=Start&SWEHo=isp.us.dell.com Delta (US)]
* [https://dell.gosavo.com/Search/Search.aspx Salesedge]

== Reference ==

Finally lets insert an image on the page
[[File:Looneytunes.png|left|frameless|That's all for this lesson.]]

Reference

How to create a login

The basics of MediaWiki Creating, Editing, Discussing Pages Working with the syntax text formatting - youtube.com

MediaWiki: Headings and Tables of Content - youtube.com