Difference between revisions of "Wiki editing guide"

Latest revision as of 19:30, 4 July 2024

UrW wiki uses MediaWiki which has a lot of helpful guides and tutorials on how to edit a page. Another useful source for tutorials are Wikipedia's help pages. In this guide, I try to list some useful tips for editing a page and I'll also add links to mediawiki's help page on the subject in the section headers'. In UrW wiki, edits are limited to registered users to avoid vandalism.

An even shorter guide is wikipedia's cheatsheet.

Quick wiki guide

After you're logged in, you can press the edit tab on the top of an article, or the edit links available next to sections. Also, when clicking a red link, i.e. a link to page that doesn't exist, you are taken to the edit tab of that article.

For the most part, editing the wiki is really easy: most of the editing is simply writing text, and if you don't know how to do something, you can just check how it's done in another page (or another mediawiki altogether). Links to other articles in the wiki are generally just words in square brackets, and infoboxes are also often easy to update, you'll just have to find the correct variable to modify (or add it if it's missing). Tables and images/files are a bit more tricky.

By the way, you can use the <nowiki></nowiki> tags to escape wiki markup.

After you've finished editing, or you just want to know how the page looks now, press the Show preview button at the bottom. This will show a preview of the page with your edits and the edit box will still be at the bottom of the page. After previewing your changes, you should write a short description of what you did in the summary box. If you only added links or fixed typos or broken links then you should check the This is a minor edit box. When you've previewed and described your edits, press the Save page button

Next up are some quick tips to things you'll find in the wiki including links, tables, images, templates and infoboxes.

Headers and general markup

When editing an article, you may want to divide it into sections and subsections and even subsubsections. Section headers are text written between a number of = signs, e.g.

• ==Quick wiki guide== is the level 2 header which is the biggest header that should be used when editing.
• ===Links=== are the subsection headers in this guide.
• ====Infoboxes==== You'll rarely need headers this size or smaller.

You can italicize text by using '' on both sides of the word or words you want to italicize. Bolding text works similarly but you'll just use ''' instead. For example:

• ''Italic text'' gives Italic text
• '''Bold text''' gives Bold text

You can force the end of a section with <div style="clear: both"></div>, e.g. if you have images you want to have in a certain section. There's an example of how images work if the section is not ended in the images section of this article.

Links

Links to other pages in the wiki are marked by writing a pair of square brackets on both sides of the other article's title, e.g.

• [[Watercraft]] Links to the page Watercraft
• [[Watercraft]]s Also links to the page Watercraft. This time the link looks like this though: Watercrafts
• [[Watercraft|punts and rafts]] Also links to the page Watercraft. The page that the link is to is simply separated by a | sign and the actual link looks like this: punts and rafts.
• [[Linen undershirt]] Links to the page Linen undershirt
• [[Linen Undershirt]] Notice the capital letter in Undershirt. This links to the page Linen Undershirt which is different than the previous page and doesn't exist or is a redirect.

To remedy situations where the same page has title or spelling variations, redirect pages can be created. For example, the Linen Undershirt page could be redirected to the existing Linen undershirt page like this:

• #REDIRECT:[[Linen undershirt]]

External links can be written in multiple ways:

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Links gives https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Links
• [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Links MediaWiki link help] gives MediaWiki link help
• [[wikipedia:Unreal World|UnReal World]] gives UnReal World

Images

Images are included in an article using the File syntax which is quite complex. Images often need to be used in quite specific ways in articles and it's best to refer to mediawiki or wikipedia for detailed instructions.

Some examples from the wiki:

• [[File:Settlement collage.png|frame|right|border|Types of settlements clockwise from top left: village, single house, fortified village and kota camp.]] gives the image from the Settlement article.
  

  Types of settlements clockwise from top left: village, single house, fortified village and kota camp.
• [[File:Fat.png|24px|Chunk of fat]] gives the image from the Fat article.

Tables

Tables can be a bit owerwhelming at first as each cell is written separately using the wiki markup. First there is the part that tells the wiki that the information is a table and how it should look. Then the information of each cell is written starting from the top left corner of the table and moving from left to right, and after reaching the end of a row, starting again from the row below. Using your browser's search function (usually ctrl + F) helps considerably in finding the correct row.

Here's an example of how a simple table looks in wiki markup:

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|row 1 cell 1
|row 1 cell 2
|-
|row 2 cell 1
|row 2 cell 2
|-
|row 3 cell 1
|row 3 cell 2
|}

The same table without <pre></pre> tags used to prevent the table from being drawn:

Templates

Templates are a way to use the same information or formatting in multiple pages. They are used by typing the template's name in double curly brackets {{}}. Any page can be used as a template but often they are written in a special Template page and the page titled Something template contains instructions for the template's use.

Generally templates simply insert the contents of what's in their page to the page they are included in. This can be done in useful ways though, as will be shown in the subsection discussing UrW wiki's infoboxes, which also are templates.

Examples of templates used in UrW wiki:

• {{key|space}} gives space. It has a fancy template page that looks different when included in a page.
• {{I for imagination}} gives the I for imagination tag:

• <blockquote>{{:fat}}</blockquote> copies the contents of the Fat page in a quote box:
  

In UnReal World, fat is both an object received from butchering animals and an essential part of nutrition received from food.

The fat received from animals can be used as food or as tanning material instead of bark.

In character nutrition, eating fat and foods with high fat content such as salmon and bear meat will quickly increase the characters nutrition level to abundant.

Infoboxes

Infoboxes are a type of template that create an infobox, like all the items and plants have on their individual pages. They have a lot of parameters to fill when used but the parameters don't necessarily need a value. Missing parameters will be visible in the infobox in triple curly brackets, e.g. {{{skin}}}. Unfortunately infoboxes get their title and image name from the page they are on so our example's image won't work.

An example of a filled infobox (Lynx):

{{Infobox Animal
| type = Land Mammal
| regions =
| terrain =
| weight =
| speed =
| movement = Walk
| health =
| weapon =
| trap = [[Big deadfall trap]]
| bait = [[Badger]] (cut), [[Squirrel]] (cut)
| water =
| avgProtection =
| warmthProtection = 
| tearProtection =
| edgeProtection =
| squeezeProtection =
| pointProtection =
| bluntProtection =
| butcher = 17-23 lb lynx cuts, 3 lb lynx-skin, 0.3 lb lynx fat
}}

This gives the following infobox:

Notice the title, broken image link, which can't be fixed (without tampering with the template), and the {{{skin}}}, which could be fixed by adding the line

| skin =

somewhere in the infobox template.

Deleting pages and vandalism

The amount of users who are authorized to remove pages is very limited, so it can take a while before any such person visits the wiki. If you find (or accidentally create) a page that needs to be deleted, add it to the Category:Delete so it'll be easy to find when needed. If you don't have a wiki account, or you wish to make sure spam gets removed, you can e-mail erkka at enormouselk.com. In your e-mail include a link to the spam content. Thank you!

If a page, including its title, is clearly spam or other vandalism, it should always be added to the Delete category and all its content should be removed. If spam or vandalism is found on existing wiki pages, the spam should be removed (preferably by clicking the 'undo' button in the page history). We don't want UrW wiki advertising spammers' messages.