Preferences

The following is a list of things to do for various reasons. Some make editing much simpler, and others are good for other stuff. One or two are for everyone's benefit rather than the individual user, however the majority are to ease learning and editing here on the Wiki.

To do the following, click the arrow to the right of MORE on the top right of the screen. Click "Preferences" (surprising, right?). And make sure you hit "Save" at the bottom of each page.


 * Customize your Signature.
 * Hit "Editing"
 * Enable Rich Text Editing - untick. This makes editing much more difficult, and makes actually learning how to edit close to impossible.
 * Use blank page as default for creating a new page - tick. Otherwise the wiki will annoy you with options and add things you simply have to remove before getting started.
 * Make any other changes as you see fit, if something's not working out for you, go back and change it. If you change your settings for the worse and are unsure what setting is the problem, go here and inform people of your current settings.


 * Hit "Recent changes".
 * It's worth changing the figures to "30" and "500" so that the page is as helpful as possible, but this is not important and depends on what you personally prefer.
 * Hide minor edits in recent changes - make sure this is not selected, it makes the page less useful to you.
 * Use enhanced recent changes - clic click click. This is a very helpful change which will show each page once per day, instead of once per edit. You can choose to get the edits to a specific page to drop down so you can see who did what in which order.


 * Hit "Followed pages".
 * Make my followed pages list private - tick. The alternative is an ugly addition to your user page, and nobody's all that interested in what pages you're following. Not important, but may as well do it while changing other Preferences.
 * Everything else here is even less important, change things to suit yourself. With RecentChanges, nobody really uses their watchlist anymore.


 * Hit "Search".
 * Make sure it searches "Main" by default.
 * The first six options are all worth ticking.


 * Hit "Search suggest".
 * Tick


 * Hit "Misc"
 * Enable "jump to" accessibility links - tick
 * It's probably best not to changes anything else here.

Right, you're now finally finished! While this was likely somewhat time consuming, it only needs to be done once. And in the case of some - e.g. Rich Text Editor - it makes a huge difference to your editing experience. Thanks for taking the time, and you're now free to do what you want when you want on the Wiki. The MSM hopes you enjoy editing here.