Article Creation and Editing Suggestions

(Difference between revisions)

Revision as of 23:42, 9 January 2011

Do not play around with Samuel L. Jackson

Key life lessons

Don't be afraid to edit a page and add content that you are able to contribute, even if you're unsure as to how to format it. Feel free to tag it and indicate that the contribution could use formatting cleanup after you provide the information -- there are plenty of people willing to assist with formatting information they may not be able to provide.

It's highly recommended that you use section headings within your article to provide a table of contents tree. Additionally this will allow you to use anchors within your document, which will greatly aid in further organizational suggestions
Avoid simply linking pages by their helpfile word content. This has become a bad habit, and causes some horribly ambiguity within powers, concepts, commands, skills, and other entities which may share a single name. A good example of this occuring would be the word "elf" or "invoke". Rather than these articles, you'd want to create a page for ELF Invocation, Reaper Invoke, then a disambiguation page such as the one found at invoke.
Try to group content into good complete articles. There's no reason for a guild with 40 helpfiles for various topics to have 40 articles -- instead, simply create a single article, and organize all your content into relevant section structures. A good example of this is the Red Magi Guild Home article.

For the most part, text content from the game is formatted pretty well. Unfortunately this format won't directly translate to the wiki without some minor touch up work. The most simple example I can give of this would be used fairly extensively throughout all the pages you find. When pasting text from the game into an article, simply add a space character before every line. This will do a simple monospaced quoting style which will preserve the formatting well and still allow for wiki linking inline with the text.

Information that is likely to constitute spoilers should be marked using the spoiler boundary templates. These are used simply by putting {{spoilers}} and {{endspoilers}} in your page. See Free Imptropolis for an example. What's a spoiler and what isn't is a matter of judgment, but there are some things that are clearly always spoilers, like quest walkthroughs. For other things, the guideline is that if it's interesting information that takes some effort to find out through the game and is rewarding to discover, it's probably a spoiler.

 =Organizational Suggestions=
 * It's highly recommended that you use section headings within your article to provide a table of contents tree.  Additionally this will allow you to use anchors within your document, which will greatly aid in further organizational suggestions
-* Avoid simply linking pages by their helpfile word content.  This has become a bad habit, and causes some horribly ambiguity within powers, concepts, commands, skills, and other entities which may share a single name.  A good example of this occuring would be the word "[[elf]]" or "[[invoke]]".  Rather than these articles, you'd want to create a page for ELF Invocation, Reaper Invoke, then a disambig template page such as the one found at [[invoke]].
+* Avoid simply linking pages by their helpfile word content.  This has become a bad habit, and causes some horribly ambiguity within powers, concepts, commands, skills, and other entities which may share a single name.  A good example of this occuring would be the word "[[elf]]" or "[[invoke]]".  Rather than these articles, you'd want to create a page for ELF Invocation, Reaper Invoke, then a disambiguation page such as the one found at [[invoke]].
 * Try to group content into good complete articles.  There's no reason for a guild with 40 helpfiles for various topics to have 40 articles -- instead, simply create a single article, and organize all your content into relevant section structures.  A good example of this is the [[Red Magi Guild Home]] article.