Guidelines to writing articles

Here are a few tips to writing articles on the X-COM Wiki:

• You need to log on to your account before posting or editing new articles here as we had to put certain measures in place to reduce spammers.

• Use capital letters when needed.

• Punctuation. Good punctuation clarifies and eliminates potential confusion.

• Use ellipses (...) as a last resort and only if it cannot be avoided.

• Make wikilinks to the names of aliens, equipment, etc. Don't repeat wikilinks within an article: turn the first reference into a wikilink, but leave the remaining references as "plain" text.

• If you link to existing articles, but they appear red (page does not exist), check to see if you are using the same spelling and capitalization.

• Use section headings to divide your articles into manageable segments.

• Categorize articles.

• Always double-check your spelling, punctuation and grammar before submitting new articles or any major edits. This helps reduce future editing work. When submitting changes to an article (no matter how minor), first preview it, then save it. Previewing catches lots of common errors (like broken/wrong wikilinks).

• If your article contains too many links to the same articles, consider revising it and using a See Also... section at the end of the article.

• Don't fret too much when deciding between American and British spelling variations of the same English words. It does not matter. Use whatever convention is comfortable and avoid editing wars by asking for spelling confirmation from the author. The best way to avoid a spelling dispute is to refer to its in-game usage.

• If you are unsure about creating any new articles, or are having second thoughts about the content, discuss it with other article writers before proceeding. Do this through whatever channels that are available to you. The "discussion" (or "talk") pages of articles is a good place for this; Talk:Main Page is where site-wide editing issues are discussed. Users' individual Talk pages are also a good place to conduct editing discussions.

• Do not write as if you were in a chat room or text messaging. Write out your words and use complete sentences.

• Avoid emoticons.

• When submitting in-game images from any games in the X-COM series, kindly convert it to .PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format. GIF's are also tolerable, but avoid JPEG's at all costs since it is a lossy image format that is suitable for photo-realistic images, but works very poorly with images with limited palettes such as used in the first three X-COM games.

• For PNGs, remember that the color depth of the image greatly influences the size of the image. Set to 16 million colours, the file size can be depressingly large. Where possible, game images saved as PNG should have the color depth set to 256 color (or lesser) to keep the size small.
• Consider also using a PNG optimizer such as PNGOUT to reduce the size even further. There may also be other optimizers out there.

• Remember, these are only tips and guidelines. If it is necessary to break any for your article, do so.

• Try not to use the main articles as a chat page. Use the talk page of that page to do so.

• Do sign your messages in Talk pages. Use four tildes ~~~~ to insert your handle and a timestamp. Alternately, the second to last button in the edit box will insert this for you at the cursor.

See Also

• Community Portal