Polus

<- Manual

Entering the editor

To create a new page, you may use the Create button in the topbar, which will prompt you to input a page ID. When you click a redlink, that'll also bring you to the editor to create that new page.

To edit an existing page, simply click the Edit visual button in the Actions menu on the left pane. After doing so, the main content and infobox will become editable. On mobile, you have to swipe right to those panes. If Edit visual prompts you to convert the page to Markdown, you should say yes, because that's likely an old, unconverted Wikitext page from before 2026. If the option doesn't appear at all, it means you're on an always-Wikitext page like a template or a system message.

Main pane

Title and short description

To edit the title of the page, as well as the short description, the gray text below the title that gives a brief explanation of the topic, you can simply click on the text and edit it.

Formatting

To add a heading, you can use the H2, H3, and H4 buttons, which stand for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th level headings. Since the 1st level heading is simply the page title, the highest heading in a page will be H2. Then, a sub-heading inside a H2 heading's section will be H3, and so on for H4. H5 and H6 also exist, but do not have their own buttons, and are generally not recommended because they're too deep.

Polus supports the following content text formatting options: bold, italic, strikethrough, underline, ^superscript, and _subscript. You have 2 ways to make something bold: either click the first option in the toolbar, which says B, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + B. Similarly, italicizing something can be done with the I button, or Ctrl + I. The next 2 buttons in the toolbar are then for superscript and subscript. Since strikethrough and underline are only seldom used, they are hidden under the + button near the middle of the toolbar.

Numbers

To write exponents, simply put ^ between the numbers. For example, 2^8 will become 2⁸. Polus will also automatically recognize scientific notation in the format ax10^b and make it look nice, so 5x10^4 will become 5×10⁴. Note that ^ only works when the exponent is a number, not a letter, so if you want 2ⁿ, you'll need to use the normal superscript option.

When you wrap a number and a unit in slashes, eg. /7.25x10^24 kg/, it'll render as 7.25×10²⁴ kg where you can click on the unit to show automatically generated conversions.

Block elements

There are 2 types of lists. Bulleted lists are preferred for all cases except when the ordering genuinely matters, in which case you'll use a numbered list instead. Of course, you can add a bulleted list with •, and a numbered list with 1. After typing an element of a list, pressing enter will continue with the next element. To end the list, press enter twice. New items in ordered lists will automatically count up for you.

To add a table, use the ▦ button. Hovering over a table will reveal tabs on the left and top, which you can click to select an entire row and column, respectively. When you do that, a few options will appear on the right, which allow you to add or delete rows/columns. To select many rows/columns at once, you can use Shift and Ctrl like you would when selecting files in File Explorer. When you select 2 rows, the options will instead be to add 2 rows instead of 1, and the same goes for any number of rows you select, as well as for columns. To merge cells, select the cells you want to merge, then click Merge cells on the right.

To add a quote, you can use the ❝ button.

Links

To add a link to another Polus page, use the [[ button, and then type the ID of the page you're linking to. For example, if you wanted to link to rigel, you'd type Rigel. By default, a link's text is the title of its target page, which is why that link says Rigel. To specify a different link text, you can add a pipe (|) then the link text, like blue star.

To add a link to a different website, you can use the syntax [ link text ]( URL ), which is inserted by the 🔗 button. For example, [NASA's official website](https://www.nasa.gov/) shows up as NASA's official website. Another way to link to an external website is by using interwiki prefixes, which you can see at Special:Interwiki. For example, Wikipedia has the prefix wp:, so instead of doing [Philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy), you can just use [[wp:Philosophy|Philosophy]], which is more concise but will give you the same result.

Another type of link you can add is a mention. For example, @Anpang will be a link to his userpage: @Anpang.

Images

Here's a caption!

To add an image, use the 🖼 button. Let's say you want to add this image, that has the filename Kométa C-2020 F3 (NEOWISE).jpg. You can either make the image stay inline with the text, in which case you'll just use something like [[File:Kométa C-2020 F3 (NEOWISE).jpg]].

The other way to add an image, and actually the main way, is to add it in thumb mode. [[File:Kométa C-2020 F3 (NEOWISE).jpg|thumb|Here's a caption!]] results in the image block you see to the right. As you can see, you need to specify thumb, and you can also optionally add a caption which will appear below the image.

Images can either be sourced from Wikimedia Commons, the Wikimedia Foundation's media repository which Wikipedia also uses, or a local file on this wiki uploaded with Special:Upload.

Citations

Say you just wrote something from some source and want to cite it. Firstly, add an inline citation tag after the sentence. The '1 button, which may show a different number, will help you with this. Then, in a References section at the end of the article, add an ordered list where the item of the number of the citation tag has a link to that Wikipedia page.

If you got many things from one source, you can just put that one citation tag in many places. However, the References section can't contain duplicate links.

For an example of citations, see Earth.

Categories

At the bottom of the page, you can see a category editor. Click + to add a new category, and then you can simply type a category's page ID to add the page to it.

Infobox pane

Visuals and coordinates

At the top of the infobox pane, you'll notice 2 toggleable buttons: Image and Star map. When you turn on Image, it'll let you put an image file name, as well as a caption to go with it. Note that the image file name shouldn't have the namespace File:, but of course, has to have the file extension.

Then, below that, there are 6 fields to let you enter celestial coordinates. The text in Note below goes below the coordinates and is intended to be a note about the coordinates, and Note beside goes to the right of the coordinates and is intended for containing a citation.

When you set the coordinates and toggle Star map on, that page will appear on the star map once you save. A page's appearance on the star map is affected by a few factors. If it's a star, it'll appear as a dot, with its color determined by the Spectral type infobox entry. If the short description says that it's some type of deep sky object (nebula, cluster, galaxy, etc.), it'll appear as a diamond, with its color dependent on exactly what object it is. In both cases, its size on the star map depends on the Apparent magnitude infobox entry.

Fields

The Fields section contains the actual content of the infobox. To add a row, just use the 2 buttons at the bottom that say Add heading and Add entry. To move a field around, just drag the handle on the left of each field. And finally, to delete a field, simply click the x button to the right of it.

Inheritance

Sometimes, it's useful to have a page take the image, coordinates, or infobox entries from another page, and when the source changes, the page changes as well. For example, there's Alpha Centauri for the entire star system, and then Alpha Centauri A for the main star. It'd make sense to have Alpha Centauri inherit the coordinate data from Alpha Centauri A to show on the star map, but then have Alpha Centauri A inherit the image from Alpha Centauri. We can do this with a feature called inheritance.

To use inheritance on the image or coordinates, simply toggle the Inherit button on and put the page ID (not the title) of the page you want to inherit that from. To inherit an infobox entry, click Inherit entries. That'll give you an Inherit from: entry where the top textbox is the page ID and the bottom textbox is the list of labels to inherit from, separated by commas.

Controls

To undo/redo, you can use the ↶ and ↷ buttons on the right of the toolbar, or the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + Z for undo and Ctrl + Y for redo.

To save a page, use the menu at the bottom of the main pane. There, you can optionally put an edit summary, summarizing what you edited. And then, just click Save. Alternatively, you can click Cancel to discard all your edits.