Help:Editing primer

This page will go over information on how to preform functions necessary for editing that aren't just messing with existing content. See Help:Handout for important information that all people with accounts need to understand.

For information on how the markdown of MediaWiki pages work, see Help:Formatting.

Creating pages

Use the search bar and pretend to search for the page you want to eventually exist (spelling and case matter). A new page will appear telling you the page does not yet exist and ask if you wish to create it. 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 is called moving on wikis. This is because the edit history and meta data have to be moved to the new page name as well as just it's content. This is accomplished by hovering your mouse over the button that says "More" and selecting "Move".

Redirects and page name importance

Any links on the wiki which point to a moved page 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 makes Gummybears automatically send a viewer that goes to it to Gummy bears. This is the acceptable means of handling the 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 an administrator or seasoned contributor before moving pages.

Protected pages and files

Very rarely, an administrator will determine that a page or file should only be edited by administrators. This is indicated by editors seeing a View source button rather than Edit or Edit source. These are usually pages relating to policy, files which are official, files that are widely used where changing them is unlikely to make sense, or templates that if broken can result in a negative cascade effect that makes the wiki unreadable.

If there is a page that an editor wishes to edit, but cannot, they are to contact an administrator for assistance. Editors can also ask to become an administrator (see Help:Permissions) if this becomes a frequent problem.

Categories

A category is a special kind of page that easily groups pages together for navigation and classification purposes. A list of all categories is available at Category:Categories. Any new page added should be given atleast one category, and it should be the most specific category available. Editors unsure of where to place a page should put the page in Category:Categories and then post in some public place they did so. This way, a more seasoned contributor can give the appropriate category later.

Categories are added in the Visual Editor by clicking the 3 horizontal bars to the left of the Save changes... button and selecting Categories. In markdown mode, add the text [[Category:<category-name>]] anywhere on the page. For stylistic reasons, it should be at the very bottom.

Using images

Any image that an editor wishes to use must be manually uploaded to the wiki. This is done by going to Special:Upload.

Notice how there is a big box of information at the top of Special:Upload that says "Important File Uploading Guidelines". This should be read in it's entirety.

Once an image is uploaded, it can be added to a page in the VisualEditor by clicking "Insert" on the toolbar followed by "Images and media" then locating the relevant file. For information on how to do this in markdown, see Help:Images.

InstantCommons

Editors will quickly see that, if adding images using the VisualEditor, that there are a lot of images they can add to a page that aren't actually hosted on this wiki (i.e not at Special:ListFiles). This is because this wiki has opted into InstantCommons. This is a feature that allows the native use of any image uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, a project that hosts files that exclusively have free licenses, as if it were on the wiki locally. Any image available from this service may be used freely.

Edit summaries

An edit summary is a box available near the Save changes button that gives editors the ability to describe what their edit has done. This makes it simpler to review page history and see how a page changes over time. This is strongly desired, but not required.