User:Warwick/Wiki-Editing Guide

Massive Help Guide!

Editing a Talk Page
When writing on a talk page you can use ==New section==

Sub-subsection
Normally only ==New section== is required, and it's just used to signal a whole new topic to discuss.

On talk pages you use : to indent. Each time you reply to someone's edit you indent once.

You should also sign the edits you make to talk pages (but only the edits you make to talk pages), this can be done using ~

Here's an example of a talk page discussion:

Taking about Cynn
I reckon Cynn would have to be the cutest female character in Guild Wars. --Example Guy 00:18, May 23, 2008 (UTC)
 * Ah that's why everybody says but you need to think outside the box, Glint's obviously the winner, what's cuter than a female dragon? --Warwick 00:11, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Here's the code for the discussion above:

==Taking about Cynn==

I reckon Cynn would have to be the cutest female character in Guild Wars. --~
 * :Ah that's why everybody says but you need to think outside the box, Glint's obviously the winner, what's cuter than a female dragon? --~

Editing a Page
All articles have an edit tab at the top, click it to edit a page. Many articles are broken up into sections, it's usually easier to just click the edit text for a particular section.

Once you've made your changes to the page, if you feel the edit is minor, mark the check box accordingly (the vast majority of edits made are minor). You may also find it useful to add an article to your watchlist. Before you save the page, it's generally a good idea to preview it first. Once you're happy with how it looks, add the edit Summary (a short sentence saying what your edit was is normally fine) and click Save Page.

For the basic ways to manipulate text such as: bolding and italicising, creating lists, etc. see here, here or here.

Editing wikis is generally straight forward but there are a few particularities to the GuildWiki and wiki editing in general. I'm sure you'll learn plenty has you go but here are some tips to get you started:
 * 1) Read this if you haven't already, Lunarbunny's Grammar Guide!
 * 2) The editing help page is quite useful (a link to it appears each time you go to edit a page). How to help is also a good starting place.
 * 3) There's more editing help here, here and here.
 * 4) Please don't wikify links (putting  around a word)  multiple times throughout an article. Wikifying the first occurrence is almost always sufficient.
 * 5) Don't post the market price of an item, we don't do that here. The merchant's price is ok but not what people are trading an item for.
 * 6) Create an account, it's easier to keep track of your edits, allows people to discuss things with you and gives your edits more authority.
 * 7) Don't write questions on an article, use its talk page to ask questions related to the article.
 * 8) When editing a page, try to make your summary comment short and relevant, it helps out those who are watching the Recent changes.
 * 9) To upload a picture, click the Upload File link on the left nav bar. When uploading pictures, don't use the BMP format, use PNG or JPEG (or in certain unusual circumstances GIF) but don't reduce the quality on JPEGs too much.
 * 10) You can and often should add pages you edit to your watchlist (use the Watch tab up the top).
 * 11) Sign your Talk page edits with ~, don't sign your article edits though!
 * 12) We only capitalise the first word of articles, unless it's a proper noun. E.g. Purple item has a lowercase "i" but Titan Quest has both the "T" and "Q" capitalised. See Ulc for more information.
 * 13) Keep spelling standard across an article, don't use both Commonwealth and American English  spelling the same article. In the sentence above I've written "capitalise" so I'd now write standardised instead of standardized to keep it standardised.
 * 14) You can create test pages off your user page, E.g. User:Warwick/Sandbox or you can use the Sandbox.
 * 15) Before you jump in and create an article you should see if there is an existing style guide. This makes life much easier and keeps everything standard.
 * Category:Helping out contains articles to help get you started. Some of these such as Category:Policy, which is the rules/policies that apply here, are important and should be read.

Creating a page
Well the next logical step is learning how to create a page. Firstly, search for the page on the left navigation bar (or Special:Search), to make sure that the relevant page doesn't already exist. Double check your spelling. In particular make sure you try adding or subtracting an "s".

Once you're sure that a relevant page doesn't already exist you can go ahead and create the article. There's several of ways of doing this, probably the easiest is to type the name you want to use for the article into the search field and hit Go. Once the page loads, click on the create this page link. When creating article names, don't use all capitals (unless it's a proper noun or the game uses capitals for it), see Use lower case for more info.

The tips that apply to editing an existing article also apply to creating a new page.

Moving a page
Moving a page on the GuildWiki is not difficult but there's a few things to bear in mind. Firstly you need to decide if this is a simple move that nobody is likely to have any objections to (such as an article spelt incorrectly, things in your namespace etc.) or one that needs to be discussed first? If so you need to add the move template to the top of the article ( and say on the talk page why you think the article should be moved. If you're confident that the article is ready to be moved, use the move tab up the top (next to history). The old article will still exist, it will just redirect to the new one. At this stage you need to go back to the old article and click on left navbar link What links here and so you can then edit all the pages the have links to the old article and update them to link to the new article. When no pages link to the old article you can decide if you want to keep the old page or add the delete tag.

Quirks of wiki editing
Ok here's quirky things you can do on a wiki:
 * To directly link to something put a : in front it it. I.e. Image:Bow type flow chart.gif . This is useful for things like linking to an image without showing it and for linking to categories without actually adding the article to the category.
 * If you want to display some text directly you can use   and the text inside the nowiki tags will not be wikified.
 * To create a redirect, you write #REDIRECTUser:Page to redirect to
 * If you want to improve the way you use images, [[Image:Nogem.jpg]] is the simplest way to add an image, but you can change the images size, [[Image:Nogem.jpg|25px]] will decrease the size to 25px wide. You can see what this looks like below. Finally, [[Image:Nogem.jpg|right|frame|Save Gem!]] will add a frame, which you can see to the right.

Maintenance Help
If you find an article has been vandalised, go to the history of the article (it's a tab up the top), find the most recent unvandalised revision, select it, go to edit, copy the text out then open up the article again and save the old copy. The easiest way to detect vandalism is to keep track of the Recent Changes and use the "(diff)" link to see what's been changed. To request a ban on a user who's been vandalising the GuildWiki, go to their User Page and add the following

If you can see an article that you think should be deleted, you can flag this using on the articles page. If it's obvious, that may be sufficient, if you think other users may object you should explain your reason for wanting the article deleted on its talk page.

There are quite a few other flags we use, see Category:GuildWiki and Category:Templates/Notices for a some lists.

User/Talk Pages
You user page is a place to put some information about you and your Guild Wars characters. It is your own page so you can largely do what you like with it, within reason. If you use another user's user page as inspiration, please declare this on your user page. Many of us work hard on the design of our user pages so give credit where it's due. If a user has requested that you don't copy a part of their user page, please respect that, for example if you use my boxes (that say My User Page, My Talk Page, My Contributions etc.) please put a link on your user page giving me some credit ;)

Your talk page (aka discussion page) is where others can leave a note for you, questions, comments etc. and you can do the same on the talk pages of other users. Although you have a high level of freedom on your talk page, it is important to note that you shouldn't blank/remove parts of your talk page. If it's getting full, create an archive by making a new page (e.g. User talk:Warwick/Archive 20) then move the current contents of your talk page to your new archive page. You could also leave some of the more recent comments and just archive the discussion sections that you feel have been resolved.

Conclusion

 * Have a look over our policy pages so you don't accidentally do the wrong thing, we don't have that many rules here and use common sense as often as you can.
 * Also watch your language, we don't swear here, anybody of any age or background should be able to read the content here.
 * When editing an article, even a simple edit, check out Style and formatting so you know your edit doesn't throw things out of whack and you may even tidy up the article a little ;)
 * This is not a replacement for the Helping out pages such as Community Portal, Editing guide and How to help, this is just my take on it and nothing on my page is official policy (you need to read the policy pages for that), it's just the opinions and observations from someone who's quite active and has been here for quite a while.