Help:Editing pages

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It is very easy to edit the contents of the wiki: with an account in hand, it only takes a few clicks! This article describes the Edit function of wiki pages. See the contributor's guide and other help pages on how to contribute to the wiki for how to edit pages and provide content.

Note
Edits should preferably be short so that glancing over the recent changes and the edit summary can give an idea of the reasoning behind them. It is usually preferable to make one edit per section at a time, if possible. An ideal edit often has a specific impetus to it, and makes clear how it makes things better. Other editors need to be able to understand why things were changed to be able to decide if an edit should be kept or not.

Editing one section

In addition to the "Edit" and "Edit source" buttons in the page bar, section headings themselves have buttons for editing those sections only:

Editing one section[edit | edit source]

Edit box

Enter changes to wiki source text here, following the Gentoo wiki guidelines. There is also a "visual" editor available.

When editing a whole page, the edit box is filled with the wiki source of the entire page. Navigating through this source can be daunting. When editing a section in the source editor, only that section's source will appear in the edit box.

Tip
When editing a section, more sections can be added above or below the current section. Editing the whole page is therefore not necessary.

Edit summary

Enter a short description of changes in the "Summary:" box, just a quick reference for other editors to know what was done in an edit.

The summary gets stored alongside the edit, and allows other contributors to track changes in the wiki more effectively. Changes might not be obvious, so the goal of this field is to describe the changes and the reason behind them at a glance.

For very small changes that can't reasonably need any further work, such as fixing links, punctuation, or typos, please check the This is a minor edit box. This will allow other editors to concentrate on larger modifications when checking over what is going on in the wiki.

Tip
Internal wiki links using square brackets ([[page name]]) can be used in the summary, and they will be displayed as clickable links to other readers.

Tip
/* Edit summary */ produces →Edit summary:, which links to that section of the current page. These links are automatically created when editing one section. Editors may find them very useful when reviewing others' edits.

Preview

The "Show preview" button will show what a page will look like once it is saved, but without actually saving it. This is helpful to see what a page will look like before saving to check for obvious mistakes.

When editing a section, only that section is previewed. This reduces the amount of scrolling required when moving back-and-forth between the edit box and the preview.

Show changes

The "Show changes" button previews the differences between the existing version and the edited version. This feature can help to determine what information to include in the edit summary.

Save changes

This button will commit the modified article to the wiki. Make sure to have confirmation after clicking: depending on the configuration, it may ask to properly fill in the edit summary before effectively saving. Some content may refuse to save, such as incorrect links to internal wiki pages - correct any errors before saving.

Source comments

It can be helpful to leave comments in the wiki source both as an aide-mémoire and for other editors:

<!-- Note about content to remind everyone of why things were done like this -->

Editors will see the notes either in the source code or represented in the visual editor, they will not be displayed when reading the page.

The {{Ednote}} template may be used to draw attention to particularly important points.

Watch this page

Select this check box to add the page to the user's watchlist on saving.