VDR Wiki:First steps

Your first steps should be made on the VDR Wiki:Sandbox. That page is meant for experimenting and testing; you can edit and tweak to your hearts' content there.

Simple text modifications

Step	What you do	What happens
1	Click on this link: VDR Wiki:Sandbox (this works best if you open a second browser window to keep this manual - on most browsers, you have to shift-click or right-click, then choose "open in new window...").	The "Sandbox" page is displayed. It already contains a lot of other peoples' text.
2	Click on the "edit" link, which can be found on top of the page. There is link below the text area ("Editing help"). You should open that page in a new window for additional information.	A new page is diplayed. It contains the content of the Sandbox in a so called edit box, in which you can change the text. Possibly there a some strange symbols scattered throughout the text. These so-called "tags" are responsible for formatting and links between articles. The most important tags are described in the wiki markup page and the links howto page.
3	Make a few changes and click on "Save page" afterwards. Paragraphs are created by making a blank line, for example.	Now the page is saved and will be displayed to every user like you see it now. If, however, another user saves their version of the page in the meantime, an "edit conflict" has occured. In that case, the upper text area will show the text of the other user, your text on the bottom and the differences between the texts in the middle. You can now copy and paste your changes from the lower to the upper text area and click on "Save page" again.

Links and new pages

Step	What you do	What happens
1	Click on "edit" once again and add some text in double square brackets, for example: [[Eiffel tower]]. Click on "Show preview", and look at the result.	Now you see a link to the page Eiffel tower. Because an article with this title already exists, you can reach the article by clicking the link.
2	If you want the displayed text to be different from the name of the article, do the following: During the [[First World War|War]] there was.... (the "pipe" symbol seperating name and text can be found left of the space key, on Macs it is Alt-7). Try it: Click on "edit", enter above text, and "Show preview".	You will see the text: During the War there was...
3	Now create a link to a non-existing page. Like this: [[This page does not exist yet]]	It will look like this: This page does not exist yet. The red color indicates that there is no article with that name yet.
4	Click the red link.	The edit page for the new article will be displayed. It contains a blank text area, in which you can type the text for your new article.

What to do now?

Well, logically you should take your second steps now - there you can find everything you should know for working together with other vdrwikians. Those who want more detailed information should have a look at our FAQ.

If you have additional question, feel free to ask on our help desk.