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I have seen people use footnotes of some sort (if I remember correctly, most were just hyperlinks to outside pages, like so 1 (http://www.dilbert.com)). Are there rules about using footnotes? Are footnotes desirable?--branko

I haven't seen any rules about footnotes, but personally I don't like the style you use above to refer to outside websites. When I see [1], I immediately think "footnote" or "references" and go to the end of the article to look up reference number 1. But there is none. I think it would be better to have a decent references section at the end of the article, listing outside sites (with URL, title, author, so that they can be found even if the URL changes), articles and books. If those references are numbered, you could actually use the [1] notation to refer to the first item. --AxelBoldt

Most new users don't understand how to generate an anchor for a hypertext link.

The method appears to be [<URL goes here> <Anchor goes here>]. However, I just did a modification of one of those [1] thingies, and it worked fine with just [<URL>] so maybe something's changing behind the scenes, because I don't remember this happening last week. User:David Martland

I agree. Is there a way, however, to link from a footnote to the reference it belongs to? In HTML you would use the name-attribute in an a-tag.--branko

I just spent 20 minutes changing the footnotes in an article to link directly rather than to a name-attribute: all I had was a link, with no author and article name. I agree that having those would be better; however I do not mind if the ^footnotes link directly, as long as the notes are still listed out at the end. My .02. And no, I don't think the name-attributes are working, though you might second the request. --Koyaanis Qatsi

I can see that what people use for italics and bold letters are the HTML codes ( etc.) and not the quotation marks that are given in the table. In fact, the quotation marks (or apostrophe or whatever) don't seem to work. Should't this be fixed? I dare not do it myself because I'm not very familiar with this. Calypso

They are quotation marks: two give italics, three give bold, five give bold italics. It should work fine. Here's an example: italics, bold, bold italics. AxelBoldt

How do I undo a circular redirect? Canada/cities is a redirect to Canadian cities, which is a redirect to Canada/cities. The content may be in a previous version Canadian cities, or may have been lost altogether. We can redo the content, if necessary, but not with the double redirect in place. (I can't get to Canadian cities to find its diffs/history.) Vicki Rosenzweig

If a page redirects you elsewhere, immediately below the title you will see ('Redirected from <pagename>'). This pagename is a link, leading you to the redirecting page but without being redirected. From there you can get to editing the redirect page, viewing its history, viewing its Talk page (if it has any)... Andre Engels

<del> and <ins> are slightly different from <s> and — in particular, they are the correct form for the meanings attributed to them on this page (deleting old material and inserting new material). Indeed, <s> and are now deprecated. The sticking point, unfortunately, is if <del> and <ins> are not supported by older browsers. They do appear to be newer than I thought; that's a damned shame. When will people stop using Netscape 4! — Toby 06:35 Oct 29, 2002 (UTC)

What is zh:Wikipedia:%E5%A6%82%E4%BD%95%E7%BC%96%E8%BE%91%E9%A1%B5%E9%9D%A2? -- Zoe

It's an interlanguage link to Wikipedia:如何编辑页面 (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3A%E5%A6%82%E4%BD%95%E7%BC%96%E8%BE%91%E9%A1%B5%E9%9D%A2) on the Chinese wiki. --Brion

There seem to be two possibilities: (a) I'm stupid, or (b) there is no current mechanism to allow flowing text around images. (i.e., no equivalent to the HTML ALIGN= ) and thus a lot of rather ugly pages. Can someone let me know which theory is correct? (And also, if this is the best place to ask this sort of thing.) Tannin

There's no special wiki syntax for it at present, but we do allow a subset of HTML. Some pages use a floating table, others a div: <div style="float:right">[[Image:foo.png]]</div>. --Brion

Thankyou Brion. Tannin

In order to get the format of the source (edit) page cleaner, it would be nice to be able to start a new line without getting a blank line (or other effect of RETURN). This could be done by starting the new line with some character (say a pipe | which "undoes" the previous RETURN and is otherwise ignored.

This would allow ";subject:description" to be written as (ignore leading space)

 ;subject
 |:description

which is cleaner.

I could also do

 ;subject
 |:long description
 that happens to wrap over
 several lines
 |
 ;nextsubject
 |:next description

where the | (or whatever) allows for "blank" lines in the source but not the article. -- 217.24.129.50[?] 09:11 Jan 2, 2003 (UTC)

It would also be nice if there was a "no leading vertical gap/margin/border" option (perhaps with !) so that I could type

 Here is a list
 !*Item
 !*Another one

and get

 Here is a list
   *Item
   *Another one

rather than

 Here is a list

 
   *Item
   *Another one

-- 217.24.129.50[?] 09:11 Jan 2, 2003 (UTC)

Any idea why these tables are so wide? How can we make them narrower? -- Zoe

It will be beacuse one (or more) of the table entries is in a style which doesn't permit line breaks - probably done because that is a necessary feature of the format being explained. Once one entry is "that wide", everything else spreads out to use its width. -- SGBailey 10:00 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

Table of contents

Center an image Can anybody help me with center on a image. Can get it right and left, but not in the middle. Tryed the FAQ, but couldn't find any explanation there. I have tried putting the picture into a tabel, but no luck there. Tried also to find a allready centered picture, but no luck there.

Thanks in advance BrianHansen. (Danish wikipedia).

I think "

Centered image." should work, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone made a supposedly better way in the latest version of HTML. --Ellmist Sunday, January 19th, 02003

There would be a more easy way to edit a table. I.e. the user could indicate "Insert table with Columns X Rows". A new window would be opened with a minibox for every cell. The user could include text in the cells. When finished, the coulde would be included in the main edition page where the cursor is. Mac 01:36 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

See m:Wiki markup tables for efforts to support tables better. Your idea isn't there, so you may want to add it. -- Toby 10:29 Mar 8, 2003 (UTC)

anyone else notice how odd it is how it says that it automatically hides namespaces and things in parens, and yet it simply doesn't... 24.62.131.217[?] 07:12 Mar 16, 2003 (UTC)

Read it again and try it. --Brion 07:30 Mar 16, 2003 (UTC)

Bold apostrophe Is there a way to make a title which ends in an apostrophe both italicized and bolded? See Burnin'. Tuf-Kat

Nobody knows or cares whether a space is bold or italic! --Brion

I would never in a million years have thought of that. A sheepish Tuf-Kat

Could be worse; see Wiki:SixSingleQuotes. ;) Also, if you need to abut a printing character (like punctuation), you can separate it with an empty HTML tag (Know what's great? Wikiin'!) --Brion

In page targets

I think that A section with

A subsection

should produce A= targets -- like:

 <H2><A NAME="A_Section">A Section</A></H1>
 with
 <H3><A NAME="A_Section__A_Subsection">A Section</A></H3>

which would allow people to produce links direct to the section marker[?]
Darkonc[?] 14:14 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

Anchors?

It seems that some long articles would benefit from anchor links from an outline in the top. Are anchors a part of wiki markup? Can HTML anchors be used? BobCMU76 11:09 May 12, 2003 (UTC)

Links already support anchors, but we don't have a wiki markup for defining them. :) You can cheat, though, if you really want to. See Wikipedia:Sandbox#anchor. (May not work on some very old browsers that don't fully support HTML 4.) --Brion 11:14 May 12, 2003 (UTC)

Is Netscape 4.7 considered 'very old'? I've not even tried to learn past 3.4 and not much of that either.

4.7 was released three years ago, and it was a couple years behind on standards even then. A series of 4.7x and 4.8 point releases have failed to make any improvements in this area. --Brion 15:28 May 12, 2003 (UTC)

I'm confused. If I want to place an anchor, what do I do?

I have a strategic question regarding the use of ... as opposed to ''...''. I know that ... has been deprecated, but it is endorsed by How to edit a page. If I'm writing a foreign-language expression (i.e. sine qua non, or something in Elvish), I want it to be italicized, as convention dictates, not just emphasized. I'm afraid that non-italics-supporting browsers would use a contra-conventional mode of formatting, thus obviating the reason why italics were deprecated in the first place. I'm bringing this up because I've been copyedited at least once after using .... Smack 05:50 30 May 2003 (UTC)

The only example here is in math, because that's the only place tha I know it to be used (and I wrote the text here). I would support you in using in situations where it's clearly correct, especially if it's not one of the specially recognised meanings of '' in Wikipedia (see the Manual of Style too look for them). But for myself, I never italicise foreign phrases anyway. (The text should either be clear what the phrase is, used for a specific purpose, or an alternative in English would fit better in the encyclopaedia.) -- Toby Bartels 04:56 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Some discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:Alternate text for images

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