User:Xasxas25616711

Preface
I've noticed that a few people are using my grey boxes (and the general idea of boxes for articles in the user space) which is fine, but please give some credit on your user page for it. See below for more info about borrowing stuff off user pages. Thanks.



Help
Common (These are the things I find myself saying all the time to new users!) ;)
 * 1) Sign your talk page edits with: ~
 * 2) Use the "This is a minor edit" checkbox for minor edits. You can turn this on permanently in your preferences.
 * 3) Use the preview button, all edits appear in the Recent Changes which some of us look over. Try no to clog it!
 * 4) If you're writing a new build, read the Style and formatting guide and Build Writing 101.
 * 5) When creating your user page, if you borrow some code or inspiration from somebody else, please add a small line crediting that user. E.g. "Layout inspired by Xasxas256"
 * 6) If you have any questions, ask! There's always someone who's happy to help.

General
 * 1) For those that are curious, Gravewit owns the site and I suppose you could call Nunix his right hand man. You can look up the rest of the admins here.
 * 2) http://www.gamewikis.org/blog/ is used to discuss some GuildWiki aspects.
 * 3) User questions can is used as a Question/Answer forum.
 * 4) Try to be nice to the other members here, you won't agree with everything everyone says but try to argue a point objectively without making it personal.
 * Category:Votes shows any issues currently being voted upon by the GuildWiki community

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, 2006 (CDT)
 * 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? --Xasxas256 00:11, 3 July 2006 (CDT)

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
Ok onto 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.

Ok once you've made your changes decide if your edit is a minor edit or not and 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) If you upload an image, don't use the BMP format, use GIF, PNG or JPEG 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:Xasxas256/Secondary Profession Guide 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 by using the search on the left nav bar, make sure that the relevant page doesn't already exist. 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 on. 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 decided 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:Xasxas256/Archive1) 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.



Curios
My Bow type flow chart can be used by anyone to find out which of the standard 5 bow types a bow is.

Notes about self
I'm male, from Australia and I don't like seeing things links being wikified 10 000 times in the same article. Articles should never had more blue underlined text than black text!

Notes to self
Xasxas256 ''Remember your local time may not be the server's time, if your time zone offset isn't -5 then the time you see in the history will be different (as talk page sigs are in sever time but a page's history is in local time). Either manually convert local time to server time or don't include the time if your offset isn't -5. &mdash;The preceding unsigned comment was added by'' Xasxas256 (contribs) 19:53, 25 May 2006 (CDT).

Very untidy Builds page, random links: User:Xasxas256/Takahata User:Xasxas256/PanSola User:Xasxas256/Test User:Xasxas256/Test2 Old votes

Notes to the reader
In my time here I've found that most new users fit into one of three categories:
 * The polite, apologetic new user. They normally come in with little Wiki editing experience but just want to help out. They're either very worried about making mistakes so they only make simple edits and are continually saying "sorry if my last edit was wrong, I'm just trying to learn!" OR They launch themselves into every aspect of the GuildWiki and boldly edit as many different things as they can! Both types will have a talk page full of notes from regulars that begin with "Just a quick note, when you're editing..." to which they reply with "oh sorry sorry I didn't realise, I won't do it again!" Sure they make mistakes but they're always happy to learn. These by the way are my favourite types of users. ;)


 * Our second group have some Wiki editing background, generally from the Wikipedia although it could be another wiki. They have no fear of editing any article or template and do plenty of reading to try and get a grasp of how things are done here. They hate backing down and have the ability to find some some talk page post or a policy from either here or Wikipedia that backs them up.


 * The third type of user has little Wiki editing experience but unlike the first category of users, they're rude and abusive when pulled up for something. They tend to launch into massive tirades over trivial things, generally when someone edits or removes a contribution they've made. They also have the ability to find policy/talk page comments that support them but they're nowhere near as good at it as the second group. These users tend not to last and if they do leave it's generally with a spiteful, biting comment about a particular user they've singled out and also say that the whole GuildWiki community sucks and they'll never contribute here again. It's important to note that these users are not always "born" like this. When making a criticism or suggestion to a new user, remember to still be nice! First impressions are important, a terse, know-it-all comment never goes down well, oftentimes a user will join this category in part because of that kind of comment (I think a person's general disposition is an important factor too).

I guess the general thing is to try to be nice to your fellow editor because it'll always pay off. I really like hanging out on the GuildWiki and I reckon that we're a pretty helpful and friendly bunch, despite highly different backgrounds. Don't launch personal attacks because you'll find you won't get far with that. Respect the other users here, even if you disagree with them. Finally, remember that discussions on the GuildWiki are not debates. Your job isn't to argue one point, it's an attempt to find the best solution to a problem, backing down isn't a sign of weakness; it's the sign of a properly functioning discussion!

P.S. Don't be scared to post on my talk page to talk about...anything, it doesn't have to be GuildWiki related! Xasxas256