How does one edit a page/Format a page

Demonstration area

• What follows is an area for demonstrating the various effects possible using Wikipedia, such as bold, italics, numbered lists, etc., etc.
• Click "edit" at the top or bottom of this page (i.e., the page you are now reading!) to see how these effects were achieved!!!
• If you don't click "edit" now you won't understand what's going on!!!

New paragraphs are made by simply pressing the "enter" or "return" key twice. If you press it just once, like this, a new paragraph will not be made (as you can see).

Here is
the proper way
to make single-spaced lines.

This line is indented.

This line is indented even farther.

Who knows how far it can go?

 This line is indented by using an initial space,
               but since I didn't use a colon ( : ) 
   at the beginning of the line, it appears as a monospace font such as "Courier".  
  In other words, if you begin a paragraph with spaces, that 
      line will be both indented and in a monospace font.
 This is very useful for importing monospace formatted tabular materials, especially from sources like 
 an unnamed encyclopedia from a project that puts out-of-copyright texts into the public domain. 
 Also note that space-indented lines will not wrap!  They will simply increase the width of your window.

This line is in italics. (Using double single quote marks!)
And so is this one! (Using good old html tags!)
And this! (Using still different code! How versatile! How confusing! But any of them will do.)

This line is bold. (Using triple single quote marks!)
So is this one! (Using the standard html tag!)

Here is a new style link: Larry Sanger (see Free Links)
Here is an old style link: HomePage
Consider not capitalizing your page names: definition of philosophy; see naming conventions
the text of this link is different from the name of the page it links to
it really doesn't MatterWhat youType in the...link description. It's all linkéd!
An external link: http://www.nupedia.com/about.shtml
Another external link: [Nupedia about page]

If you type in the URL of a picture, it will be displayed rather than linked to:

You don't have to create weird page titles, like Platos?, just to make the plural or possessive form of a name. Plato's? wouldn't work anyway. You can write: Plato's or (more cleverly) Plato's. In the old linking system you'd do it like this: JimboWales's homepage (using ""). (Just Say No to the old linking system; after all, you can now link to Jimbo Wales's homepage!) But it does look like you're stuck with Platos Republic, because [Plato's Republic]? doesn't work, as you can see, although if you want to type a bit more you can cleverly create Plato's Republic.

Here is a numbered list:

1. Item 1
2. Item 2
3. Item 8

 #Notice, this line isn't numbered because it is not flush left.

#Neither is this line

Here is a bulleted list:

• Here's an item
• Here's another item
  • We can do bullets within bullets, as it were
    • Pretty nifty, huh?

You can make a horizontal "rule" (line) on a page:

---

Or two, if you wish:

---

---

There are three ways to display, rather than parse, wiki code:

1. you can use the <code> tag

2. you can use the <pre> tag

3. you can use the <nowiki> tag

The difference between <code> and <pre> is that the pre tag preserves line breaks, while the code tag does not. The nowiki tag works like the <code> tag except that it doesn't use a monospace font. (We made liberal use of the <code> tag on this page.)

You can create subpages: /Talk
Sorry, but you cannot create subsubpages: /Talk/TalkAboutTalk?
You can link to other subpages: Charlize Theron/Filmography or even charlize Theron/Filmography.

We can do tables:

Item one	Item two
Item three	Item four

Fancy table:

Item one	Item two
Item three	Item four
	Item five

Here's another way to make a table:

Heading
cell 1	cell2	cell 3
cell 1	spanning 2 columns

(We haven't implemented that way of doing tables, as you can see.)

Very often you might need to use special characters, like these: ü À α
See Wiki special characters for what you should and shouldn't do.

You can make ^superscripts and _subscripts and you can control the font size and color!

• f(x) = a₀ + a₁x₁ + a₂x₂² + a₃x₃³ + ...

• f(x) = a₀ + a₁x₁ + a₂x₂² + a₃x₃³ + ...