Thread:Fossiliferous/@comment-26676640-20150825121955/@comment-24668482-20150825135427

Hi PrinAnne,

I added the link there - I put it to your user profile page (using User:PrinAnne), but can be changed to go direct to message wall instead (using Message_wall:PrinAnne). I am actually contemplating removing that column as seems a bit repetitive and will just allow people to link their name in first column if they want instead...

Anyway, the link button is at the top of the page when you are editing, usually next to the Bold and Italic buttons. I was trying to come up with a description and the best I got was 'it looks like a link chain' but that isn't particularly helpful so I have screen grabbed it for you instead.

There are 3 editors here, and which you are using can depend on your browsers and also your profile settings.

The main one these days is the 'new visual editor', which looks like this:



If you highlight a word and then press the link button a small box will appear and you can start to type the link you want to add to that word. It is actually really smart at identifying what link you want, so it will find it and give it as an option as you type (so you don't have to worry too much about exact spelling):



On some mobile devices and some browsers, you might not have the new visual editor, in which case you will be using the old 'visual editor' (which the site now calls 'classic editor' to help cut down confusion. It looks different, but the link button happens to be in roughly the same position:



Again, you can just highlight the text you want to turn into a link and then press the button and a box will appear that you can type link into:



In both Visual editors (new and classic), the link box will usually tell you if it recognises the link or not, so you will know if you have it right.

And that is basically it. But just to really confuse you - there is the 3rd way of doing it. Both Visual editors (new and classic) are basically graphical displays of what you are doing, but they both have an option to switch to Source mode, which shows the page in wiki text instead of visually. Its a little strange to look at at first, but can be very useful and saves a lot of time once you get used to it. I probably use the Source editor over the Visual editor 90% of the time these days (purely out of laziness). Namely, I like the 'Classic' Source editor as my go to editor:



You'll see that each cell of the table has a separate line, but don't worry about that. To add a link you can use the link button (this time it is Ab underlined in blue for internal links and a globe next to it for external links) but I don't bother with that. Because that is the joy of source, you no longer need to press buttons to add things, you can just type what you want. It is 2 square brackets either side of a word to turn it into a link. If you want the writing displayed to be different than the link then you type the link first followed by a pipe (vertical bar/line) and then the text you want displayed. By typing in all the commands you want, you can edit faster (in my opinion), and you can also find mistakes faster. Sometimes things look really odd in visual editor and you might not be able to see why, but it will be immediately obvious what is up when you look at the Source. I am actually using source now for example, because it is much faster for me to type in the link for a photo and then type commands for its shape, size and orientation than it is to mess with the add photo button and going through all the options one by one there.