---
layout: doc
title: Editing the Wiki
permalink: /en/intermediate/editing_the_wiki/
lang: en
category: intermediate
---

Editing the Wiki
================

Introduction
------------

OpenStreetMap is based around a community of mappers working together.
Because of this it is necessary to have a way to communicate with each
other-- whether it be to organize social mapping events, to discuss
different projects related to OSM and/or to create standards for mapping
processes.  The key avenue for mappers to do this is through the
OpenStreetMap wiki, a website where users can create different web pages
about different topics and in different languages.  To see the OSM wiki,
visit

[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org)

A wiki is a website where any user can add pages and edit existing
pages.  It is based on the same principle as OpenStreetMap- the only
difference is that with OSM users are editing maps, while wiki users are
editing text.  The most famous wiki is Wikipedia
([http://www.wikipedia.org),]() an online encyclopedia that covers
almost every topic imaginable.

The OpenStreetMap wiki contains information about everything related to
OSM.  When someone is working on a project that uses OSM, they create a
wiki page so that other people can read about their project.  The wiki
contains help for users wanting to learn more about OSM, for common
standards on how to make maps and on how to tag objects on the map, as
well as many other OSM things.  You have already seen at least one of
the OSM wiki pages, which describes all of the most common features that
you can add to the map, and how they are commonly tagged.  This is the
Map Features page:

[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map\_Features](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features)

In this chapter we will learn how to add and edit pages on the OSM wiki.
 We will learn the guidlines for contributing, the special markup
language for creating a wiki page, and helpful ways for improving the
wiki, such as translating important pages.

​1.  The Wiki and Signing Up
---------------------------

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image09.png)

Go to [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org) to
see the main wiki page.  You’ll see a lot of things here, and many links
to other pages on the wiki.  In the left column are links to some of the
main pages.  At the top of the page are a list of all the languages in
which you can view this page.  If it’s available, you can switch the
page to your language.  Try exploring some of the links on the page and
see the kind of information available on the wiki.

You don’t need to have an account in order to view the OSM wiki, but you
will need to create an account if you want to edit or add pages.  Note
that this is not the same as your OpenStreetMap account.  You need to
create a new account, although you can use the same name on the wiki as
you did when signing up for OpenStreetMap.

- To create a new account, click on “Log in / create account” in the
    upper right corner of the website.

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image14.png)

- If you already have an account you can login on this page.
     Otherwise click on “Create an account.”

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image11.png)

-  Fill in the form with the username you want to create, your password
    twice, your email address, and your real name.  In the CAPTCHA box
    at the top you need to type the two words that are shown in the box.
     This is a security prevention to ensure that you are human, and not
    a computer.
-  When you have filled in all the fields click “Create account.”
-  Now you will be automatically logged in, and you will see your
    username and other links available in the upper right corner of the
    website.

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image02.png)

​2.  Getting Started
-------------------

Let’s start out by editing our user page.  Every user has a page on the
wiki.  These pages are commonly used to provide information about
yourself, your location, for interpersonal communication, and for
creating test pages and drafts.  This is a great place for us to start,
and learn the basics of editing a wiki page.

-  Go to your user page by clicking on your username in the upper right
    corner.  My username is “MapJeff”, so I will click on this.

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image10.png)

-  Right now the page is empty.  Click on “edit this page” to add
    something to it.
-  We can type anything into the editor to add information to the page.
     For example, let’s add some basic information and a description.
     You can add your own information, but here is an example.

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image13.png)

- When you have added some text, enter a summary of your changes in
    the box next to “Summary” and click “Save Page.”  The page will look
    something like this:

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image03.png)

- This is great because I have successfully saved my text to the page,
    but it is no good because it not formatted in a good way.  In order
    to make it look nice, we need to learn some of the basic wiki
    formatting techniques.  Click “Edit” at the top of the page, and
    let’s make some more changes to our page.

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image04.png)

-  If you understood the previous chapter on XML, you will remember
    that we used elements which have opening tags and closing tags.  We
    will do something similar on the wiki, using special characters to
    surround the text we want to appear a certain way.
-  The wiki doesn’t automatically put new lines in unless we ask it to,
    so we need to put the tag <br> at the end of each of our lines in
    the first section.  This will cause a line break to occur.
-  Then, we want the words “About Me” to appear highlighted since it is
    the heading of a section.  To do this we can surround it like this:

        = = About Me = =

- Now our code looks like this:

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image01.png)

- And after we save it the page will look nicely formatted:

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image15.png)

- Practice formatting your text in different ways.  A small hint:  the
    buttons above the text box will automatically insert different types
    of formatting code into your text!

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image12.png)

- Once you have saved your page, it will be viewable by anyone on the
    internet.  The following link goes to my page, but if you replace my
    username with yours, it will go to your user page.

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:MapJeff](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:MapJeff)

​3.  More Formatting
-------------------

In this section we will discuss many of the different ways you can
format your information on a wiki page and the appropriate codes to use
to create different elements.  It’s a good idea to practice before
trying to create an official wiki page that you want others to see, so
first let’s create a sub-page under your user page where you can play
around and practice editing.

- You can create any new wiki page by typing in the link to the page
    that you want and then creating a new page.  For now, let’s create a
    new subpage that we can use to practice our wiki editing.  Open your
    web browser to the following address, replacing “MapJeff” with your
    own username.

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:MapJeff/testpage](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:MapJeff/testpage)

- This will take us to an empty page that we can edit.

Now let’s look at how to format our text.  Feel free to use your test
page to try things out.

### Basic Formatting

| Description                               | Example          | Result           |
|-------------------------------------------|------------------|------------------|
| Surrounding text with two apostrophes (') will display this text in italic.   | ''italic text''  | *italic text*     
| Surrounding text with three apostrophes (') will display this text in bold.   | '''bold text'''  | **bold text**
| Surrounding text with five apostrophes (') will display this text in bold italic   | '''''bold and italic text'''''  | ***bold and italic text***
| Four dashes in a row will create a horizontal line.  This should be used sparingly.   | - - - -  | ____________

### Special Formatting


| Description  | Example wiki source  |  Result   |
|--------------|----------------------|-----------|
| A pair of '< nowiki>' and '< /nowiki>' disables the wiki-syntax in the enclosed text.  | '''bold text''' | **bold text** 
|     |  < nowiki>'''bold text'''< /nowiki> | '''bold text'''
|Surround your text with '<!-- ', ' -->' and the enclosed text will not display on the wiki-page (a comment). | Comment! <!-- this is a comment which will not be shown -->  |  Comment!

### Headings and Subheadings

A section starts with a header consisting of a line beginning and ending
with two or more consecutive equal signs (=). The number of equal signs
indicates the nesting level of sections.

When you create sections and subsection headings in your wiki page, the
page will automatically have a table of contents section created at the
top of the page.

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image19.png)

### Lists

It’s easy to create a bullet list.  In order to make an item in a list,
you simply need to use a star (\*) as the first character on one or more
consecutive lines.

To create an ordered list, you simply use number signs (\#) instead of
stars (\*).

You can create nested lists by using a combination of stars and number
signs.  Nested lists display as lists with different levels of
indentation. When nesting lists you may mix bullet lists and numbered
lists on each level.


![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image18.png)

### Links

Links within the OpenStreetMap wiki are quite simple.  Simply surround
the name of the wiki page you want to link to with double brackets
[[wiki-link]].  You could add different text for the link by adding a
pipe symbol (|) and the text will appear as the link text.  If you want
a special language version of a wiki page, you should prefix the page
name with the two-letter language code and a colon (:).  For example, to
link to the German version of a page, you would use [[de:wiki-link]].

If you want to link to an article on Wikipedia, prefix the name of the
article with “wikipedia:”  For example, [[wikipedia:article-name]].  If
you want to link to a wikipedia article in another langauge, you can add
the language code like this:  [[wikipedia:de:article-name]].

Finally, if you want to create an external link, simply type the URL and
it will display as a link.  If you want to change the link text, you can
use one set of brackets to change the text which links to your URL
[external-link link-text].

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image17.png)

### Tables

Tables are probably the trickiest thing to create in a wiki, but easy
once you understand how it works.  First, you need to understand that a
table is really a grid that has some number of rows and some number of
columns, and one type of information is contained horizontally in rows
and another type vertically in columns.

A basic table needs the following parts:

- A line with the first two characters '{|' indicating the begin of a
    table.
- An optional line with the first two characters '|+' for the
    caption of the table.
- One or more table rows, beginning with '|-' and usually no other
    content
- After each table row one or more lines with table cells and their
    text/content. A table cell has as first character a pipe symbol (|)
    and the second character cannot be either plus (+) or minus (-)
    because these two are reserved for caption and table row
    respectively.
- A line with the first two characters '|}' indicating the end of a
    table.

It is good practise and increases readability to use a space as
second/third character, thus avoiding any ambiguity.

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image16.png)

Play around with all these different techniques for formatting your
wiki.  If you want an example of all of these things, try viewing the
test page I created here:

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:MapJeff/testpage](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:MapJeff/testpage.)

Compare the wiki text to the way it is formatted when you are viewing
it.

You can find more information on editing at
[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Help:Wiki-Editing](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Help:Wiki-Editing).

​4.  Conventions and Guidelines
------------------------------

You can create any wiki page the same way that you have created your
user page.  However, before you run off creating pages to your heart’s
content, it is important to understand some guidelines for how to best
contribute.  Some key things to keep in mind are:

### Before Creating a Page

- Don’t Duplicate.  When you want to create a new wiki page, do a
    comprehensive search of the wiki to ensure that someone else hasn’t
    already created a page about the same topic.  You can search for
    existing pages using the search box in the upper right.
- If a page that you want to create already exists, but you think it
    could be better, you should improve it, instead of creating an
    entirely new page.
- Choose a descriptive name, capitalize new words, and don’t use
    spaces or dashes.  The Map Features page for example, is named
    Map\_Features, making the link:

[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map\_Features](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features)

### When Structuring a Page

- Divide your page into sections and subsections.
- Create an “Introduction” section at the top of the page to give a
    brief explanation of the page.
- Format different parts of your pages as tables or lists, when
    appropriate.  (We will discuss formatting more in the next section)
- When in doubt, look at other pages on the wiki for inspiration about
    how to format things.  Remember that you can look at the code for
    any page by clicking on the edit tab and seeing how other users
    format their text.

​5.  Translating Pages
---------------------

One very useful thing that can be done on the wiki is to translate
important pages into your language.  As you’ve already seen, many wiki
pages have links at the top where you can switch languages.  However,
this is only available for pages that have been translated, and that
include a special tag at the top - {{Languages|page\_name}}

When developing the OpenStreetMap community in your country, it is very
useful for key wiki pages to be translated into your language.  Adding
translated pages is easy, as we will see here.

The names of pages are always created in English, but different versions
of the same page can be created by adding a language code into the URL.
 For example, the Map Features page is at

[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map\_Features](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features)

If you want the Spanish version of this page, it is available at

[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ES:Map\_Features](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ES:Map_Features)

If a page exists that you want to translate, you simply visit the URL
with your language code and a colon (:) preceding the page name.  For
example, if we wanted to translate this page into Indonesian, we would
visit

[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ID:Map\_Features](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ID:Map_Features)

Then we click “Edit” to create this page.

The easiest way to add a translation is to go to a page in English,
click “Edit”, and copy all of the wiki text to your Clipboard.  Then
edit the page in your own language, pasting in the original English text
and translating it into your language.  This will allow you to keep all
of the original formatting and links correctly, but translate the
English text into your own language.

​6.  Watching Pages
------------------

You may want keep an eye on pages that you have edited yourself, or that
you have an interest in.  To do this, you can add specific pages to your
“Watchlist,” which keeps a record of recent changes to pages, so that
you will know when others have edited them.

To add a page to your watchlist, click on the star at the top of the
page section:

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image08.png)

Then, you can view your watchlist by clicking on “My Watchlist” at the
top of the page:

![]({{site.baseurl}}/images/intermediate/en_int_ch6_image07.png)

On the “My Watchlist” page you choose to show changes to your watched
pages within the past hours, or days, or since you started watching the
page.

Summary
-------

In this chapter we have learned how we can edit and add pages to the
OpenStreetMap wiki.  You should now have a decent understanding of how
to create a new wiki page, how to add different formatting, and how to
create translations of existing pages.

Furthermore, It would be very helpful to discuss a bit the concept of
templates as the OSM Wiki uses them a lot and those templates can be
 quite confusing for beginners
