Help:How to manually edit a page

OpenCongress is a wiki, meaning that anybody can easily edit any article and have those changes posted immediately.

Unlike many wikis, OpenCongress employs two methods for editing pages. The first is traditional "Wiki markup." Editors (that means you) use a special code similar to HTML to display text, links, images, videos, and other media.

In addition, OpenCongress is one of the first large wikis to incorporate What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editing. This Rich Editor is similar to the ones found in most word-processing applications and in many e-mail programs.

Using the Rich editor
Unless you're already familiar with Wiki markup, or want to do something very specific, we recommend you try out the Rich editor when editing OpenCongress articles.

Editing with Wiki markup
It's very easy to edit a Wiki page. Simply click on the "Edit this page" link at the top or bottom of a Wiki page to change the page. This will bring you to a page with a text box containing the editable text of that Wiki page.

Then type away, and press "Save" when finished! You can also preview your changes before saving if you like.

It is often more convenient to copy and paste the text first into your favorite text editor, edit and spell check there, and then paste back into the browser to preview. This way, you can also keep a local backup copy of the pages you authored so that you can make changes offline.

Each article has a corresponding "Talk" page where you can discuss its comments and debate editorial decisions if necessary. To see the "Talk" page, click on the "Discuss this page" link.

In the left column of the table below, you can see what effects are possible. In the right column, you can see how those effects were achieved. In other words, to make text look like it looks in the left column, type it in the format you see in the right column.

You may want to keep this page open in a separate browser window for reference. If you want to try out things without danger of doing any harm, you can do so in the Sandbox.

Sections, Paragraphs, Lists and Lines
{| cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" border="1" width="70%" ! What it looks like ! What you type Start your sections with header lines:

Sub-subsection

 * == New Section ==

Sub-subsection
A single newline has no effect.

But an empty line

starts a new paragraph.

has no effect.
 * A single newline

But an empty line

starts a new paragraph. without starting a new paragraph.
 * - valign="top"
 * You can break lines without starting a new paragraph.
 * You can break lines&lt;br&gt;
 * Lists are easy to do:
 * start every line with a star
 * more stars means deeper levels
 * start every line with a star
 * more stars means deeper levels


 * * Lists are easy to do:
 * start every line with a star
 * more stars means deeper levels
 * 1) Numbered lists are also good
 * 2) Very organized
 * 3) easy to follow
 * 1) Very organized
 * 2) easy to follow


 * # Numbered lists are also good
 * 1) Very organized
 * 2) easy to follow
 * You can even do mixed lists
 * and nest them
 * like this
 * and nest them
 * like this


 * * You can even do mixed lists
 * and nest them
 * like this
 * Definition list
 * list of definitions
 * Definition list
 * list of definitions


 * item
 * the item's definition

of definitions
 * ; Definition lists : list
 * item : the item's definition
 * Lines can be
 * indented
 * several levels
 * indented
 * several levels


 * :Lines can be
 * indented
 * several levels


 * A colon will indent a line or paragraph.
 * A colon will indent a line or paragraph.
 * A colon will indent a line or paragraph.

A manual newline starts a new paragraph.

A manual newline starts a new paragraph. it will be formatted exactly as typed; in a technical looking font; lines won't wrap; ENDIF this is useful for: * pasting preformatted text; * algorithm descriptions; * ascii art;
 * :A colon will indent a line or paragraph.
 * - valign="top"
 * IF a line starts with a space THEN

WARNING If you make it wide, you force the whole page to be wide and hence less readable. it will be formatted exactly as typed; in a technical looking font; lines won't wrap; ENDIF this is useful for: * pasting preformatted text; * algorithm descriptions; * ascii art;
 * IF a line starts with a space THEN
 * - valign="top"
 * Centered text.
 * &lt;center&gt;Centered text.&lt;/center&gt;
 * A horizontal dividing line: above
 * A horizontal dividing line: above

and below.


 * A horizontal dividing line: above

and below. Using columns is an efficient use of space. Just put everything you want in columns below a " " tag And make sure to close your columned-section with a " ". You can use this for bulleted or numbered lists or just lines of text, too.
 * One
 * Two
 * Three
 * Four
 * Five
 * Six

&lt;/div&gt; - Sheldon Rampton or four for user name plus date/time: - Sheldon Rampton 08:10 Oct 5, 2002 (UTC)
 * &lt;div style="-moz-column-count:2; column-count:2;"&gt;
 * One
 * Two
 * Three
 * Four
 * Five
 * Six
 * When adding a comment to a Talk page, you should sign it. You can do this by adding three tildes for your user name:
 * When adding a comment to a Talk page, you should sign it. You can do this by adding three tildes for your user name:

you should sign it. You can do this by adding three tildes for your user name:
 * When adding a comment to a Talk page,

or four for user name plus date/time: ~
 * }

Links and URLs
&lt;span id="anchor_name" /&gt;

Images

 * See also: Help:Advanced media help

Videos
YouTube videos can be added to SourceWatch articles using tags,

Video from YouTube can be shown on any SourceWatch page using simple code. The video is not uploaded to SourceWatch, but embedded, meaning it is stored on YouTube, then called from there to be viewed on SourceWatch.

To add a YouTube video, you need the id code for the video. The easiest way to find this is to look at the URL of the You Tube page for the video. The string of letters and numbers after "v=" in the URL is the id code. So for the URL:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCz1kmfqL7g  the id code would be CCz1kmfqL7g.

YouTube videos are embedded with the code:

The id code for the video you want to show goes between the two tags:

"id code" is the code from the URL. So in our example, you would use:

Video display options
CCz1kmfqL7g You can enter parameters along with the tag to change the size of the video, to make it align left or right on the page, to include a caption, and to draw a border around the video.


 * 1) To specify how big you want the video to appear on the page, use the "size" parameter, which can have values of "tiny", "small", "normal", or "big".
 * 2) To specify that you want the video to float left on the page or right, use the "align" parameter.
 * 3) To include a caption, use the "caption" parameter.
 * 4) To put a border around the video, use the "border" parameter and specify the border's color by name (options are black, silver, gray, maroon, red, purple, fuchsia, green, lime, olive, yellow, navy, blue, teal and aqua).

Example: The video at right was inserted using the following code:

For examples on real SourceWatch pages, visit the article on Coronet Instructional Films, the Coal Issues portal or Al Franken.

Character formatting

 * Note that any characters can be added inside of < / nowiki>.  Following a instruction, any characters including a left angle bracket '<' will not be interpreted as instructions and will appear on the page in the browser.  (Except, of course, the nowiki instruction.  Remove the space before and after the slash in the < / nowiki> example cited here.)

Tables
&lt;table border="1"&gt; &lt;caption&gt;An example table&lt;/caption&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;th&gt;First header&lt;/th&gt; &lt;th&gt;Second header&lt;/th&gt; &lt;th&gt;Third header&lt;/th&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td&gt;upper left&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;upper middle&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td rowspan=2&gt;right side&lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td&gt;lower left&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt;lower middle&lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td colspan="3" align="center"&gt;bottom row&lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;/table&gt; If your table doesn't look right, make sure that all &lt;tr&gt; and &lt;td&gt; tags are closed with corresponding &lt;/tr&gt; and &lt;/td&gt; tags. Do not indent lines, and do not include empty lines within a table. Otherwise, you will get spurious space above the table or even a browser crash.

Here's a more advanced example, showing some more options available for making up tables. You can play with these settings in your own table to see what effect they have. Keep in mind that though colors are possible, it's best to use them sparingly. Check the above tables to see what can be done to the text inside the cells.

&lt;table border="1" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" align="center"&gt; &lt;caption&gt;An example table&lt;/caption&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;th style="background:#efefef;"&gt;First header&lt;/th&gt; &lt;th colspan="2" style="background:#ffdead;"&gt;Second header&lt;/th&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td&gt;upper left&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td rowspan=2 style="border-bottom:3px solid grey;" valign="top"&gt;right side&lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td style="border-bottom:3px solid grey;"&gt;lower left&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td style="border-bottom:3px solid grey;"&gt;lower middle&lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td colspan="3" align="center"&gt; &lt;table border="0"&gt; &lt;caption&gt;A table in a table&lt;/caption&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td align="center" width="150px"&gt;&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td align="center" width="150px"&gt;&lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td align="center" colspan="2" style="border-top:1px solid red; border-right:1px solid red; border-bottom:2px solid red; border-left:1px solid red;"&gt;Two book covers&lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;/table&gt; &lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;/table&gt; Acknowledgement: the content of many of the help pages in OpenCongress have been adapted from Wikipedia and SourceWatch.