Board Thread:Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20170605021828

On a MediaWiki wiki like this one, there are two ways of entering what's called.

Using tags
You can type your text within  tags to get something like: The Fifth Doctor's first story was Castrovalva (TV story).

This allows people to see exactly what you need to type in order to obtain the following:

The Fifth Doctor's first story was Castrovalva.

However, it doesn't try to resolve any of the markup. Fifth Doctor and Castrovalva (TV story) aren't linked to anything.

That's good, because we usually use preformatted text on user pages, forums, help pages and the Tardis namespace to show others how to enter text. And in that circumstance, monospaced text with a box around it makes things a lot clearer.

Leading space
If you want those links to show, you can instead use a leading space.

If you type this ... The Fifth Doctor's first story was Castrovalva (TV story). ... you'll get this: The Fifth Doctor's first story was Castrovalva.

But you very rarely want this, and almost never in the main namespace where most of our articles live.

Bad mojo with infoboxes
You should exercise extreme caution to avoid leading spaces around infoboxes. Notice this error: What this means is that there's a space between the end of the infobox and the beginning of the article. Let's take a peek at the code! The puppet of Ernst Bratfisch was one of the wooden puppets created using Gramm's Cyber-Technology. Yep! As expected, there's a space between the end of the infobox and the lead sentence of the article. The fix is super easy. Just get rid of the space!

You can do it one of two ways. Either make the lead sentence abut the ending curly braces  like this ... }}The puppet of Ernst Bratfisch was one of the wooden puppets created using Gramm's Cyber-Technology. ... or put the lead sentence on the very next line, like this: }} The puppet of Ernst Bratfisch was one of the wooden puppets created using Gramm's Cyber-Technology.

The article will then look right!