Wikipedia:Advanced article editing

For the mobile editing option known as "Advanced mode", see mw:Advanced mode.

There are several advanced techniques to help improve the editing of Wikipedia articles. Most of the tips given here involve using typical browser settings and standard text-editors, such as those for side-by-side editing. While special software packages to allow customized editing do exist, they are typically not available when using other computers for wiki-editing.

Complex text substitutions

Even a simple text editor such as Microsoft Notepad can be used to handle some complex changes by using multiple text string substitutions. For example, to add double quotation marks around wikilinks, a user can perform the following steps:

1. Use the search-and-replace function to change all [[ to "[[.
2. Use the same function to change all ]] to ]]".
3. For any wikilinks which already have double quotation marks, replace all "" with ".

Generally, however, any text editor or word processor can perform this function, as can the online rich-text editors already available on Wikipedia and most of its sister projects, which can be found under the "Advanced" section of the editor toolbar.

Avoiding accidental publication of an edit

Wikipedia has a user preferences setting found in the Editing section which, when implemented, warns the user about a blank edit summary line and requests confirmation before publishing. When nearing completion of an edit, however, a user might be tempted to begin composing the edit summary text, which can lead to an accidental publication of a partial edit with a permanent partial summary line. A way to avoid this would be to compose the edit summary line as the last line of the page, using HTML comment tags <!-- and --> to hide that line. For example:

(...text of article above here...) <!-- 31 changes: +2 sources; fixed 9 spellings; 8 convert ft/m; moved 6 images +commas -->

Putting that comment line at the end of the page allows the user to see and revise the whole edit summary text without the risk of accidentally publishing it, since any attempt will be stopped by the edit summary field still being blank unless the user manually confirms to proceed with publication. When ready, the user can copy and paste that bottom line as the edit summary and if the user forgets to remove that bottom line, it is only a hidden comment, so it can wait until that user (or another) deletes that comment when making further changes to that page.

Few things make editing worse than saving a partial edit, where other users see the unfinished change and either complain or change the page again, causing an edit conflict when one tries to finish and submit the incomplete edit which was accidentally published. To avoid this, one may want to publish an entire edit to a specific article only once, or wait 20 minutes after submitting an incomplete edit, because other editors may be alerted (such as through their watchlists) and might embark on their own changes to the article.

Showing double-brace markup

Although articles rarely contain the double-brace markers {{ and }}, these braces are common in wiki-template documentation pages. To avoid activating templates (except inside tables), the double-brace markers can be encoded by adding one HTML numeric character reference equivalent:

• the left double-brace {{ is {{, with bar | as |; and
• the right double-brace }} is }}.

When editing text inside of tables, then double numbers or nowiki tags should be used because tables look for a single left brace {. The double-number characters are simply {{ for {{ and }} for }}.

Far future

Perhaps in the near future, a Wikipedia edit-window will have some type of side-by-side display with a scrolling area for formatted output. However, due to the complexity of simulating a formatted page in a scrolling region, it will probably be many years before such side-by-side editing can be implemented in a single browser page. It is being implemented for translations, though.