Help:Editing
Contents |
Introduction
We're a laid-back group here at OctoWiki, and we generally won't castigate you for failing to make perfect edits to everything you touch. Try to keep the following tips in mind while participating on the site, and a good time will be had by all.
Guidelines
Wiki Coding
A list of the codes usable on the wiki can be found here.
Summarizing Edits
The one guideline that simply must be followed is this: Please use the summary field! Editing without summarizing makes the baby Jesus cry, and angers the Overlords. The reasoning is simple: many of us closely monitor the Recent Changes page in order to keep a feel for what's going on at the wiki, and to further add/clean/expand articles as they pop up. If editing summaries are not posted, it's extremely tedious to keep up. Please use them. It's simple, and adds 1-2 seconds to each of your edits. Just fill in a short summary of your edit in the 'Summary' box directly below the text editing field and above the 'save page' button. We appreciate it.
Internal References
It's worth noting that MediaWiki allows you to print references to the same page with different formats, i.e. if you type [[post]]ing it will print the word posting and underline it, but the link will point to the 'Post' entry. This prevents the unneccessary clutter that results when you have conjugations and plurals of proper entry names. Random wikization of entries will lead us to a shedload of one-line redirect entries, so please use this feature as necessary! This leads into our next point...
Article Titles
...Article titles should be singular, and non-conjugated. As above, [[post]] is a good article name. [[posting]] is not. Singular, non-conjugated article titles can be easily linked to from their plural or conjugated forms, for example as above, [[post]]ing will underline the whole word, but point to the [[post]] article. See: posting.
Self-Referencing
When referencing an article within that article, use the normal MediaWiki internal link tags to bold that article's name. For example, this page is called 'Help:Editing'. To link to this page from another page, you'd use [[Help:Editing]]. But within this page, the same tag will bold the name rather than linking it. See: Help:Editing.
Dead Ends & Orphans
'Dead end' (pages with no links elsewhere within the site) and 'orphaned' (pages that have no links elsewhere in the site pointing to them) pages are considered less than ideal. If you're creating or editing a page, please try to ensure it links elsewhere on the site if possible. Also click the 'What Links Here' link and see if any other pages link to the current one. If not, add a link elsewhere to the current page if appropriate.
Following these few short guidelines will help keep everyone in the loop, and make the site look cleaner, to boot. Thanks for contributing, and long live the Overlord minions!
