Help:Preview

Note: When you edit this page, you agree to release your contribution under the CC0. See Public Domain Help Pages for more info.

Just below the edit summary box is a Show preview button. Click it to see how the article will look without saving it. It's recommended to use this before saving. This feature lets you preview the page to ensure there are no mistakes before saving. It also helps avoid multiple saves, which can clutter the page history and make it difficult for others to track changes.

It is beneficial to save the page before moving, splitting, or merging sections of the article, especially after making minor edits. The difference display doesn't clearly show small changes if sections are rearranged afterward.

Saving only once helps prevent edit conflicts because others won't notice the article in recent changes or their watchlist , making it less likely for them to try editing it at the same time. When you're logged in , you can adjust your preferences to display the preview above the edit box rather than below it. By choosing this option, the preview will appear above the edit box whenever you click the Show preview button while editing a page.

You can set the Show preview when starting to edit in your preferences. After setting this, when you press the edit button or follow a link to an edit page, it displays both the edit box and the rendered page, just as it appears after pressing Show preview.

For automatic conversion of wikitext , the Preview button renders the wikitext, while the Show changes button reveals the new raw wikitext. However, in the case of recursive conversion of wikitext , the preview shown before or without making manual changes to the wikitext does not match the rendering of the current page.

When making a significant edit, it's a good idea to copy your content to your clipboard. Although the software does attempt to automatically save edits to your browser , occasionally, server issues may occur, and you might lose your work.

When you click Preview, you also get a preview of the edit summary. This allows you to check links, including their existence and how piped links work. Even if the summary is too long to fully display in the input box without scrolling, the preview shows it completely within the input box's capacity.

When editing a template, if the TemplateSandbox extension is installed, you can see the impact on a page that uses the template directly or indirectly by utilizing the template preview feature. See also Help:Extension:TemplateSandbox .

In the Preview page with this template section, enter the page name and click the Show preview button.

Detecting preview mode

The placeholder {{REVISIONID}} returns an empty string in preview mode. This can be used to detect if a page is in preview mode: {{#if:{{REVISIONID}}|This is the normal page|This is the preview}} will display This is the normal page.

Preview of a footnote

When editing sections if you reference a named reference in one section but define it in another section, the footnote content will not appear in the preview of the section where the reference is not defined. To ensure the footnote displays correctly during preview, temporarily copy the reference definition to the section you are previewing. This way, you'll see the footnote's content while previewing that section.

Preview of an upload

The file upload page lacks Preview for both the summary and the automatic conversion of SVG to PNG.