Help:Tips and Tricks
This page is a quick reference guide on creating, editing, and organizing Mozilla Wiki aka WikiMo pages.
Wiki Editing
How to add a new page
- First Step
- In order to add a new page to WikiMo, you need to log in. Learn about creating an account here.
- Second Step
- Once your account is approved, you can create a new page by adding /New_Page_Name to https://wiki.mozilla.org. For example, if you wanted to create a page about your local Maker Party project, go to https://wiki.mozilla.org/Local_Maker_Project. At a new URL, you should see:
There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, search the related logs, or edit this page. If the title you searched for used 'CamelCase' try searching for the page title with spaces between the words. Please do NOT create articles with 'CamelCase' titles or with everything in UPPERCASE.
- Third Step
- Select the Edit or Create option at the page. The Wikitext Editor will appear and you can edit and format the page to your liking.
Page URL Format
In order to make content discoverable, all pages names should be created with sentence casing, using underscores (_) for spaces.
Correct examples include:
- This_is_a_good_page_name
- So_is_this
The following conventions should not be used:
- No CamelCase
- No UPPERCASE (unless whatever topic the page is about uses uppercase, such as an acronym)
- No page-names-separated-by-hyphens.
- No Page:Name
Mediawiki, the software that powers MozillaWiki, uses underscores only to differentiate words in page titles. If you use FooBar, mediawiki will think FooBar is one word and won't return search results for either 'foo' or 'bar', but only 'foobar'. Similarly, if you use foo-bar, mediawiki won't return this page is search results for 'foo' or 'bar' but only 'foo-bar' exactly. If you've ever wondered why it can be hard to find things on MozillaWiki, this is quite often why.
Also, keep in mind that in mediawiki, page titles are case-sensitive. Test_page and Test_Page are different pages.
The Deal on Namespaces
Namepaces are a type in Mediawiki, the software that runs WikiMo. Namespaces are useful for wiki administrators, but can be confusing for editors. Essentially, namespaces create separate content areas or containers on a wiki.
The namespace format is: Namespace:Page_name. So the Special:Version is within the Special namespace. The MozillaWiki:About page is within the MozillaWiki namespace.
WikiMo editors without admin privileges cannot add namespaces.
By default, new pages are created within the Main namespace.
Back to our example of the local Maker Party page, if you were to add the page like so, Project:Local_Maker_Project, you would not be creating a new namespace, just a page whose URL has a colon within the Main namespace.
Currently, WikiMo has 60 namespaces. There was a trend to create namespaces for projects like Bugzilla and Gecko. Going forward, wiki admins will not be adding more namespaces.
If you want to group pages of a project together you should create subpages.
How to Create a Subpage
- To create a subpages
- Add Subpage_name to Main_page_name like https://wiki.mozilla.org/Local_Maker_Project/Subpage_One. The main page needs to exist. The main page name in this example is "Local Maker Project" (without the slash).
Categories
We highly recommend and actively encourage WikiMo users to add at least one category to pages they create.
Why Use Categories?
Categories are essential to organizing information on Mozilla Wiki. They are the prime way to make WikiMo more searchable and a tool for identifying content appropriate for this wiki.