Markdown:Learning

Some starting references:

• Mastering Markdown
• writing on github
• gfm (Github Flavoured Markdown)

Beyond markdown

If the formatting provided by markdown is not enough for a particular case, most standard html can be included as well.

Specifically on wiki pages

wiki markup syntax can be used to create links, in addition to markdown url format

• github repository relative links
• linking to other wiki pages on github
• wiki markup link
• supported mediawiki formats
  • links, horizontal rule, shorthand symbol entities

wiki markup

[[link text|wikilink]]

markdown

[link text](url)

Here, in both cases, link text is the text that will be visible on the wiki page. url is the standard web page url. Note that url can be either a full url, or relative to the current page. wikilink is a bit more limited. It is the name (not url) of the page in the same wiki. When creating links between pages in a single wiki, it has a couple of advantages. First, the name of the page can often be easier to determine than the full url. In addition, if the referenced page does not exist, the wiki will display the link in red. This makes it easy to spot broken links, and allows some progressive development. It is valid to use a wikilink pointing to a page that does not exist yet. After saving the original page, clicking on the broken link will provide an option to create the missing page.

learning resources

To get started with markdown, especially as used on github, GitHub Learning Lab includes mini courses for markdown, as well as github and html. Mastering Markdown is another place to start. That contains a bit of description, a summary of the syntax, and links to places for more information. The basic writing page is another good choice. It starts with links to categories of commands, to make it easy to used for a quick reference, when you know what you want to do, and just need a quick check on the how.

Another source of information, is the gfm page, which goes into a lot more technical detail, but is not nearly as easy to read.

The github wiki is not mentioned in that. It can also use markdown in the online editor. Other options are also available using the Edit Mode dropdown in the editing toolbar. I suggest sticking with markdown, since we are using it for other things anyway. You could use any of the other options, if you happen to already know them from somewhere else.