Using a Template

The Basics
On Royal Air Force Wiki, you are required to write a page using specific templates. This allows everyone to follow a general structure in writing a new page so the wiki remains organised. For example, when writing an aircraft article you should use the page Template:Aircraft, and when writing an article on a famous person associated with the RAF, use the page Template:Person. To visit these pages, click the links or search for them in the search box (see right).

Below is a list of all current templates with a link to them:


 * Template:Aircraft (use when creating a page on an aircraft)
 * Template:Person (use when creating a page on a famous person associated with the RAF)
 * Template:RAF Other Ranks (use when creating a page on other ranks)

Using a Template
After finding the appropriate template, in this example the aircraft template, click Edit this page on the top toolbar. The next page will come up with a huge load of script. Don't worry about this for now. Drag a box over all the text in the page, right click and press copy (see right).

Now type the name of the article you wish to create in the search box, e.g. Supermarine Spitfire, or Hawker Hunter. If you have already created the basic page for the article, click Edit this page on the top toolbar and right click and press Paste. If not, a page will come up saying, for example: You searched for Supermarine Spitfire (all pages starting with "Supermarine Spitfire" |all pages that link to "Supermarine Spitfire"). Simply click the red text (see below left) in this case, Supermarine Spitfire, and you will have created a new page for that search. Now right click in the main box and click Paste and you will have all the code pasted into your new page, ready for you to make it!

Editing Your New Page
Good so far! The next bit is easy if you listen carefully. There are two types of editing modes on this wiki - Rich Text and Wiki Text. This bit uses Wiki Text, which is slightly more difficult to use but allows you to do much more whilst the Rich Text is in its infancy. Before pasting the code into your new page, click the rightmost button on the top toolbar, called View Wikitext (see right).

Why do this? The coding used to make the table of information does not work in Rich Text format for the moment, but we'll get to that in a minute. For information on writing in Wikitext, visit the Wikia Help page on Wikitext.

Now onto the coding. It all looks like a mess, doesn't it? Well leave it and press Save page at the bottom - you can summarise the changes if you want. Wait for it to load, then go back into the editor and you can now edit the page in either Rich Text or Wikitext - its up to you! Rich Text is more like Microsoft Word, so for newbies its probably better. If you find any bugs whilst using Rich Text, just switch to Wikitext momentarily, fix it, then return to Rich Text. Well, thats it! Get creating those pages!