Help:Show preview

Below the edit box is a  button. Clicking this button allows you to see what the page will look like without actually publishing your edits. It is always a good idea to use this button before clicking the '' button, as it will give you an opportunity to look at the page and check for any errors or mistakes.

Why should I preview my edit before publishing them?

 * To check for errors. Sometimes the page may look broken because a bracket was missing in the wikitext. If you simply clicked '' without previewing, the page will look broken for everyone right away. Even if you edit the page and fix it immediately after, there is still the chance that someone may have seen the broken page in the meantime. Having to make multiple edits will also fill up the page history, which can be an annoyance to other editors.
 * To see how things will look like to readers. Something that looks fine in the wikitext of the page might not look so fine when you publish those changes. Previewing your changes allows you to have a look at the page, look out for anything that doesn't look right or doesn't look good, and gives you a chance to fix them before revealing them to the world.
 * To save yourself embarrassment. When you click '', a permanent record of your edit is saved in the page history, which anybody can access. If you make a really big mistake that you could've caught if you had used the preview button, now your mistake is forever immortalized in the page history. You never know when someone might come across the edit, whether it be in a few days or a few years down the road, see your silly mistake, and have themselves a chuckle.

Live preview
By default, when you click the '' button, the entire page will reload and the preview of the page will be shown above the edit window. If you prefer, you can enable "Live preview" by going into your user preferences, clicking on the  tab, and then selecting the  option. When this is enabled, only the preview area will reload when you click on the '' button.

Having live preview can be useful in the event that the servers go down while you are in the middle of an edit. If live preview is disabled and you attempt to preview while the servers are down, you risk losing your work. To prevent this, either enable live preview, or copy the contents of the page to a text file on your computer (or simply keep it on your clipboard) before previewing the page.

References and footnotes
If you are editing a section of a page that contains footnotes, the contents of the footnote will be previewed at the bottom of the preview area if the section does not contain  or. This allows you to preview the contents of the footnotes.

Edit summaries
If you included an edit summary in your edit, it will be previewed just underneath the edit summary box. This is useful if you are including links in your edit summary, as it allows you to check to see if the links are working. Previewing your edit summary can be doubly important, since you are not able to modify edit summaries after they have been published.

Staying logged in
Clicking on the '' button will reset your login session timer, which helps you avoid accidentally publishing your edits after you have been automatically logged out for inactivity, thus revealing your IP address. Additionally, if you have already been logged out, previewing the page will alert you to the fact that this had happened; to resolve this, open the login page in a new tab, enter your username and password, then go back to your editing window and preview the page again to make sure everything is well.