Johnravery

Hey. John Reed Avery here.

How to Create an Article (the technical; not the procedural), First Step:

In the search box near the top left of a page, type the title of the new article, then click Go. If the Search page reports "You may create the page" followed by the article name in red, then you can click the red article name to start creating/editing your article.

How to populate the body of a new article, to create a Wikipedia Redirect page:

The following line redirects to the "Interactive fiction" Wikipedia page:

 #REDIRECT [[Interactive_fiction]]

The following line redirects to the "History" section of the "France" page:

 #REDIRECT [[France#History]]

Cheatsheet for creating a Wikipedia Internal Redirect:

Let's say that you want people to be able to search for "fish legs" and find an existing page on "fish appendages". Here are the steps you would take:

 1.  In the search-box, in the left-hand margin of any Wikipedia page, 
     type & enter the words fish legs.

 2.  The resulting page should indicate that there is no "fish legs" 
     page and should include a "red fish" hyperlink in red font, 
     which you should then single-click, to be redirected to an 
     edit-page for creating a new article about "fish legs".

 3.  At this point, simply put, in the box for the body of the page, 
     the following line (no indentation):  

 #REDIRECT [[fish_appendages]]

Tips for creating/editing Wikipedia pages

Indented Fixed-Space-Text-Boxes:
Notice the above cheatsheet for creating a "Wikipedia Internal Redirect". Notice that the three steps and the final "REDIRECT" line all appear in a single box of plain text, each separated from the other by a blank line. This is accomplished as follows:

 1.  The Fixed-Space-Text-Box:
     Indent each new line by at least one space (space-bar character).  

 2.  The blank lines *within* the same Fixed-Space-Text-Box:
     The *only* way to have blank lines, within the same plain-text-box, 
     is to put at least one space (space-bar character) on each of those
     blank lines.  If you have nothing at all on those blank lines then 
     Wikipedia will interpret the completely-empty blank-line as a signal
     to end the first box and create a new one for the next visible line
     (such as with these two instructions about the Fixed-Space-Text-Box).

Get *LITERALLY* the text you typed!
Wikipedia has a complex set of interpretors (or a single complex interpetor?) that reads the various characters that you type, into your page(s), and interprets some of them to be special instructions for it to reformat what you have typed.
If you don't want this to happen with some particular section of text (including possibly the entire contents of your page, though this is not necessarily recommended) then you can either ...

 1.  Manual technique
     Type the characters <nowiki>  at the start of your chosen text.
     Type the characters </nowiki> at the end   of your chosen text.

 2.  Automatic technique
     Highlight the entire block of text that you want Wikipedia to ignore, 
     for special formatting, and then single-click the little button, 
     above the edit-box, that bears the "W" inside a red circle with a slash 
     through it.  This will automatically accomplish the same as in Step 1, 
     above.  

Otherwise about me ...

For now, please see my humble website: John R Avery's Website

Hopefully more later.

--John R Avery, 2010/Feb/07