User:Sirdog/Quick editing guide
This guide is aimed at people who are completely unfamiliar with editing on MediaWiki sites but are familiar with traditional editing systems like WordPress, any sort of word document, and so on. This guide will hit on the items that are most likely to cause confusion. Hopefully, anyway.
For information on how the markdown of MediaWiki pages work, see Help:Formatting.
Terminology
So that we share the same language, please commit the following terms to memory.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Wiki | A website that has a system in place to allow collaborative editing rather than a central authority dictating content, such as a blog. Think the Zelda Wiki, or Fandom itself. |
| Wikipedia | More properly known as the English Wikipedia, it is the online encyclopedia that everyone can edit that everyone knows of.[1] |
| Wikimedia | A non-profit foundation that performs the administration and systems upkeep of the various language editions of Wikipedia. |
| MediaWiki | A free and open source software that is designed to provide a wiki-style of editing to a website. This software is what runs this very website and the English Wikipedia. |
Creating pages
Creating pages is simple, yet unintuitive. One simply uses the search bar at the top right of any page and makes a search for the page (spelling and character-case matter) they would like to exist. A new page will appear telling the user the page does not yet exist and ask if they wish to create it. The user will click the red text that is the new page name, and then edit normally. Once the first edit to the page is published the page goes live.
Renaming pages
Unlike traditional word processing systems, such as Google Docs, MediaWiki uses the title of a page as it's internal database identifier. Page names are not cosmetic. The changing of a page's name in any way is called, in MediaWiki terminology, moving the page. This is because the edit history and meta data have to be moved to the new page name as well. This is accomplished by hovering your mouse over the button that says "More" and selecting "Move".
Redirects and page name importance
Something to keep in mind when changing a page's name is that any links on the wiki which point to it will, by default, break. So if a page titled Gummybears is moved to Gummy bears any page with a link to Gummybears will lead to a now non-existent page. This issue is mitigated by, when using the move tool, ensuring the checkbox for "Leave a redirect behind" is ticked. This then makes Gummybears automatically redirect a user that goes to it to Gummy bears. This is generally the acceptable means of handling this issue in 99% of cases. If a situation comes up where this is not desirable, then every page that links to Gummybears will need to be manually edited to lead to Gummy bears.
Non-regular editors of the war game wiki are encouraged to seek guidance from a wiki administrator or seasoned contributor before moving pages.
Warning on edit publication
 | This section is very important. |
Every edit, the content of the edit, who made the edit, and when the edit was made is publicly logged. Every version of a page after every edit is similarly logged. This makes this website incredibly resilient to breakage, but also means that it's difficult to truly delete information. Simply editing the information out and clicking "Save changes" is insufficient. Anyone with an internet connection can check the page's history and still find the information.
If an edit is published to a page with information that the user does not want to be publicly accessible, then the information should still be edited out, but then a wiki administrator must be notified so they can delete the edit from the public archives. This notification should be done privately to avoid the Streisand effect. For details on how they do this, check out Help:RevisionDelete.