ProleWiki:User guide

The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

The point of this page is to teach new editors how to edit on ProleWiki technically, if they're not familiar with MediaWiki.

Every editor is free to add to this page!

First: read our editorial guidelines

Please read our Editorial guidelines before you start editing, which will help you catch up on our writing patterns quickly.

We also recommend reading the Encyclopedic tone guide which will teach you how to write for an encyclopedia. The editorial guidelines are focused on technical formatting, and the tone guide is focused on the creative writing.

Understanding the ProleWiki interface

ProleWiki uses the Citizen skin to theme our website. You can change your theme in your Preferences if you want to use another one, but they are not supported.

The menu is located on the left and is a vertical menu on desktop. On mobile, the menu appears at the bottom of your screen horizontally before you start scrolling down.

We'll go through every icon and button on that menu. (icon pictures to be added in guide)

Did you know? You can type / on any page to bring up the search box

Logo

The first icon starting from the top is the logo. Clicking on it will take you back to the homepage of the language instance you are currently in.

Search (magnifying glass icon)

The magnifying glass icon lets you search for a page. Simply click on it, and a search box will appear in the middle of the screen, near the top. Type your keywords and hit enter to search. As you type, suggestions should fill out beneath the box. The search function is a bit unwieldy and will, by default, only search for page titles. If you want to search for content, you need to click "search for pages containing [keyword]".

Sometimes, it might not find anything despite the page existing because ProleWiki is case sensitive. If you search for "karl marx" for example, the function won't return any results. If you search for Karl Marx however, you will find his page

That's why it's important to search exhaustively before creating a new page, so that we don't create duplicates.

Megamenu (three stripes icon)

The three lines stacked on top of each other are what's commonly called a hamburger menu. Clicking on this button will open a megamenu. We won't go through this megamenu, but you will likely use the first column (Navigation) a lot. You will also likely use the "Content" column too, to access Essays and the Library.

Library (book icon)

This button takes you to the Library. We have added it manually and thus it may temporarily disappear after an update.

Essays (newspaper icon)

This button takes you to the Essays space. We have added it manually and thus it may temporarily disappear after an update.

Upload (upload icon)

This button only shows up when you are logged into your account, and takes you to the file upload page. The recommended (easier) method to upload and use a file is to copy and paste it while in the visual editor, but you may need to use the file upload page when you don't plan on using the file in a page (PDF files, for example, or pre-emptive icons). We have added it manually and thus it may temporarily disappear after an update.

Theme settings

At the bottom of the navigation bar, we have first a gear icon. These are theme settings: they will only apply to this theme. You can change the font size, use a dark theme for nighttime use, and find other settings that can make your reading experience more comfortable. These settings only apply to you.

Alerts

The bell icon opens your alerts. You will also see a notification badge around it if there are news about your account. These alerts will only notify you about things related to your account, usually after an administration action. When you are added to the Trusted group, for example, you will receive an alert.

Notices

The inbox/drawer icon opens your inbox. This is where you receive notifications about your activity on the wiki. For example if you are watching a page (refer to Watchlist) and someone adds a topic to the talk page, you should receive a message in your inbox.

Account

The last icon, showing a person, is for account management. From there, you can access several of your account pages (Talk, Sandbox...) as well as change your Settings (also called Preferences).

Visual editor guide

We don't recommend using this as a tutorial. Instead, you should use this as a reference guide when you need to do something but can't find out how.

Creating a page

You cannot create pages until you earn the Trusted role. For more information, refer to the Editor Onboarding page.

Creating a page on MediaWiki is a bit of a pain. The easiest way is to start by searching for your page.

Simply click on the magnifying glass icon in the top-left corner, and type in the name you want to give your page. If it doesn't exist (example here: Search Result), you will be taken to the search results page where you should see something like the screenshot on the right.

You can then simply click on the red link beneath the search box to be taken to the editor and create your page. Your page will not be created (published) until you type something in the editor and hit "Save changes" (in the top-right corner, or Ctrl+S on your keyboard).

Remember that ProleWiki is case-sensitive! This means Fidel Castro is a different page from Fidel castro! (Only the C in Castro changed, and you can see the first page exists, but the second doesn't -- the link is red). For this reason, please search the wiki exhaustively before creating a new page.

To make pages easily findable by others (both editors and readers), you can create Redirections from one page to another.

Our convention is normally sentence case. Please refer to the Editorial guidelines to see what that is.

Creating a page in a namespace (Library, Essays, etc)

If you want to create a page in a namespace, such as a library work or an essay, you need to follow the same procedure but add Library: or Essay: before the search terms. Example: Library:The communist manifesto. Remember you need the : colon, and you must type the exact namespace. Essays, for example, will not work (the namespace is Essay, singular).

It's a bit wonky but this is how MediaWiki works. The rest of the procedure is the exact same as any other page (click on the red link and fill in your page).

Editing a page

To start editing a page, head on over to its URL and then click on the red "Edit" button in the top right corner. If you don't see the button, there may be two reasons:

The page is protected against edits (this is the case for official ProleWiki pages for example)
You are not logged in

Once you click on the button, you will be taken to the visual editor, which is a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get): it works much like Google Docs or any other text software you use, complete with shortcuts.

Note that ProleWiki does not save drafts. If you don't save your edits before closing the editor, they are completely gone with no way to recover them!

Formatting your text

The format bar at the top of the visual editor, appearing once you start editing a page.

Undo and redo

The first icons in this menu are the left and right arrows. They are the undo and redo button, also applied with Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y.

Paragraph formatting

At the top of the page in the visual editor, you should see the word Paragraph. This is the style that is currently being used on whatever you are typing. If you click on that word, it will open a submenu with several other styles you can use, much like in Google Docs or Word.

To use a style, simply place your cursor anywhere in the paragraph you want to style (styles apply to entire paragraphs and not single words), and click on the style you want to use. It will then apply it and you should see the change happen in real time in the editor.

Styles apply to the entire paragraph. You can break a paragraph with the return key.

Character formatting

The next button is the character styling button, appearing as an underlined letter A. Clicking on this will open a list of character formatting options (formatting that only applies to the selected characters and not the whole paragraph). You can also use keyboard shortcuts (click the ? button on the formatting bar, located in the top right of your screen when editing a page).

Using headings correctly

You can use headings with Ctrl+2 up to Ctrl+6, going from a Heading to a sub-heading of fifth importance. Note that Ctrl+1 will use the Page Title style, which will style your paragraph exactly like the page title. We never use that one and have no idea what the use of it is supposed to be (it is useful to separate two books that are bundled together in the library).

Regardless, when editing you should use headings as much as possible. However, keep in mind there should not be any reason to go beyond sub-heading 3 in most cases. That is to say, just because you have 5 headings at your disposal, doesn't mean you need to use all of them.

Headings follow a hierarchy, which you can see on this page itself. You should start a chapter with a Heading (Ctrl+2), then add a sub-heading 1 in it (Ctrl+3). Sub-headings 2 are nested inside sub-headings 1, etc. Or in other words, a Sub-heading 3 never comes before a sub-heading 2.

Of course, you separate sections (or chapters) with the main heading (ctrl+2).

Adding sources

Comrade! Please source your edits as much as possible. There is no such thing as too many sources!

To add a source using the visual editor, you first need to place your cursor where you want the source to appear. It will look like this once you confirm your reference: ^[1]

Then, open the "Cite" menu at the top of the screen and select one of our templates: usually Book or scientific article or Website or newspaper article.

Click on the appropriate template and it will open a box asking you to fill in some data such as year of publication, author, title, etc. You don't have to fill everything in the box, but you should still fill out as much as possible of the template. Once you're done, click Insert in the top right corner.

While you will see the little blue ^[1] mention, you won't see your reference at the end of your page if you are adding the first citation. That is because you still need to insert the Reference list. To do that, click on Insert in the top menu, then on "More" (with an arrow pointing down) in the menu that opens, and then on References List (preceded by a book icon).

Finally, you need to add a Heading (Ctrl+2) and name it References, right above the list you just added (MediaWiki doesn't do it by default).

If you did everything correctly, it should look like it on this page: Fidel Castro. Note that per our Editorial Guidelines, references go at the very end of a page. There should be no content whatsoever below the References section.

Reusing a source

Sometimes, you might need to reuse a source on a page. You can simply do that by clicking Cite -> Re-use. This will then bring up a box with all the sources added so far, and you can simply click on the source you want to reuse.

Adding notes

Notes work much like References technically, and in fact are considered references. To add them, you would add the Cite -> Basic (Ctrl+Shift+K) template. Type in your note in the box and then write "note" in the "Use this group" option. It will look like this:^{[note 1]}

To make notes appear, you will then have to add a References list (on top of the actual references list that exists). Select that new list, click edit, and then add the "note" group into it. Then you need to add a heading called Notes above the list. In terms of page structure, Notes should be the second-last heading, with References being the last heading on the page.

We don't use notes a lot (it's preferable to add a source or internal link, i.e. bluelink), but they can be useful in some cases.

Templates

What are templates

Templates are specific pieces of (MediaWiki) code that can be reused and modded to fit the needs of a page. For example, infoboxes are based on a template: they take in standardized parameters such as Name, Country of origin, Date of Birth, the values of which change every time we use the template to fit the page. In other words, they are variables that take custom content. This allows us to use the same template for Fidel Castro and Stalin, but show different data in it (different picture, different name parameter, etc.)

Our existing templates can be found by searching for "Template:" on the wiki (it's a namespace like Library or Essays), but we list some of the most common ones to use in this guide.

Including a template in a page

To use a template, the easiest way is to type {{ while editing a page with the visual editor. This will bring up the template box. from there, you can type the name of the template you want to use (we don't use "infobox" by the way, but "infobox country", "infobox film", "infobox person", etc depending on the case.)

Once you start typing the template's name (remember that as always, it's case-sensitive), a dropdown menu will appear to suggest some templates. Click on the one you want and, if you picked the right one, you should see parameters displayed (see screenshot). You can type the relevant information in these parameters and then click save, and your template will be imported.

To edit a template, double click on its output while in the editor.

Adding more parameters

With some templates, you'll see additional parameters you can use on the left. For example on the screenshot of the book infobox, you can choose to add the publication, language, and specify the image size. Just click on the checkboxes on the left to add the parameter to the template you are editing. You still need to fill it out, of course.

Using an image in templates

For images, type the filename as exists on the wiki. Remember when you upload a picture, you are asked to provide a filename. Just type the name as is; it's not the URL or the raw file name (with extension), but the one you wrote when uploading the picture. There is also an autocomplete dropdown menu that will appear once you start typing on some templates.

Templates we use

Infobox: person, film, company, country.
For library works: Library Work.
For essays: Essay infobox and Essay quote.
You can change the displayed title by typing {{DISPLAYTITLE:your title here}}. It's not a template per se, so close the template window once you type the first two {.

Page menu

A button we haven't looked at yet is the collapsed menu in the top right of the visual editor (see screenshot).

From this menu, you can access several "meta" settings (they apply to the whole page regardless of content) that we'll cover below:

Options

Takes you to a box that shows almost all of the following options below.

Page settings (redirections)

Page settings is mostly from where you will be able to create redirects, although they are arguably easier to make in the source editor (fewer clicks needed).

To create a redirection, you first need to create a new page. For example, let's say you want to redirect China to People's Republic of China (our preferred name for this page as ProleWiki uses a country's full name to title its page). This means that you would first need to create the China page, and then, without adding anything in the editor, go to Page Settings.

Check the "redirect this page to" box, and then start typing "People's Republic": the correct page should appear in an autocomplete field.

Click on that page to select it, and then click on "Apply changes". Finally, don't forget to save your edits and commit them. From now on, the China page will redirect people automatically to the People's Republic.

Advanced settings

You normally don't need to change these settings. You can mark this page as noindex for search engines, which means it shouldn't appear on Google if you do (on by default), and you can show a tab on this page to add a new section, which at this time this guide does not cover.

Both should be on the "default" setting, but you are free to disallow indexing of your essays if you want.

Languages

To add a page in another language (which makes it easily accessible from one language instance to another), you need to use the Source editor for now. (To be added).

Templates used

This setting shows which templates are used on the page. It can be useful on large pages sometimes to know which templates are being used, but this is mostly for debug reasons. This is not where you add a template from: please refer to Using templates.

View as right-to-left

Find and replace

Find and replace can be accessed by the ctrl+F shortcut. It will pop a menu at the top of the page. It's pretty self-explanatory, you can decide to only find a string of text, or also replace it if you type something in the "Replace" field. You also have options to match case (e.g. only find KEYWORD and not Keyword), use regular expressions code (regex), look for whole words, or ignore diacritics.

Saving your edits

Once you're done with your edit and click "Save changes", you will get to fill the edit summary. You can see how it looks on the right.

When editing the summary, you have three things to look at:

Writing the summary itself
Checking the "minor edit" box
Checking the "watch this page" box.

In the summary, you should be concise but exhaustive. Briefly explain all the changes you brought to the page in a way that will help other editors see what you edited at a glance.

You can check the minor edit box if you want; there's no hard rule about this, but generally we reserve the minor edit mention for maintenance work: fixing typos and grammar, mostly.

Finally, you can choose to start watching this page. Refer to the Watchlist in this guide.

To unwatch a page, you can open your user profile on the bottom left of the screen and click on "Watchlist".

Source editing guide

This is a reference guide intended for source editors, such as those who prefer to use source editing. Unlike Visual Editing, source editing is more akin to working with a text or code editor rather than a word processor. It takes some getting used to, but some editors find it faster to use.