Help:Getting Started

Overview

The getting started page is here to help existing and budding authors get up and running writing wiki articles. For the moment, it'll contain various tips, from general naming convention tips to formatting tips and tricks that new wiki authors may want to have a go at.

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See that 'Show preview' button down the bottom of the 'edit' screen? Use it before posting. :)

Do as I say, not as I do...

- Bomb Bloke

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Starting off

Until a more comprehensive getting started section is up and running, the best way to learn how to start creating wiki articles is to click on the 'edit' button and look at the source of a page. Do this to look up how another author was able to achieve a certain effect that you'd like to duplicate.

The following wikimedia help page is a wealth of wiki text formatting information.

Also do as Bomb Bloke says, use the preview button. It's a great way of learning how to format a page without doing any damage to existing articles. Still, no worries. The wiki keeps backups of previous edits that you can look up in case you deleted by mistake.

- NKF

Tips

HTML and CSS in wiki text

Example Here's an sample of a standard html table with CSS used to supply the aesthetic formatting. If you can't see this text surrounded by a purple right-aligned box, then your browser may not support CSS.

Wiki text allows some HTML to be used. Not all of it, but enough of the basics. For example, you may want to use a lot of whitespace in your text, but wiki text may eats most of your whitespace. This happens a lot when creating a quick list of items. Without resorting to creating an un-numbered wiki list, you can use a few HTML line break <BR> to force a few carriage returns.

If all else fails, rather than pressing enter once after each list item, press enter twice.

The Wiki also allows Cascading Style Sheet elements to be included into Wiki text for the purpose of formatting.

For a list of references, you can try WDG's CSS reference.

Watch those leading spaces

If you ever place a space at the start of a new line, the following happens:

See this box? This is the result. It contains unformatted wiki text. 
You can include formatting elements in it. 
Nothing's terribly wrong With it except that if your screen is too small, it can go off the page if the line of text is too long. See what I mean? 
Note, this mimics the HTML <PRE> tag, which works on blocks of text rather than single lines.  

(You may need to scroll the page to right to see the rest of the last line)

Section Headings

Section headings divide your articles into, well, sections. To create a section heading, go to a new line and surround the title of your new section with equal signs. Like so:

= section name =

A section heading takes up a whole line, has the title bolded and a horizontal line is created underneath it. Also, all sections on a page are inserted into the current page's table of contents - assuming the table of contents for the page has not been disabled, and there are enough sections to justify a table of contents (basically, four).

Section headings have various levels. The different levels are distinguished by the number of equal signs that you surround the title with. Level one uses one equal sign on either side of the title. Level two uses two equal signs.

Level 1 is treated as the topmost heading. All other headings are treated as sub-headings. Look at the source for this page by clicking on the edit button to see title headings in action.

Section headings as bookmarks

Section headings can also act like bookmarks, in a way. They allow you to link directly to particular sections in a page from other pages as well. To do this, create a wiki link as usual, but place a sharp/hash after the link name and then followed by the section heading.

For example, to link to the Maximum Caps section in Firing Accuracy, we'd write:

[[Firing Accuracy#Maximum Caps | Firing Accuracy ]] 

Test it!

You'll find that going to the page will jump you right to Maximum Caps.

To create internal bookmarks, leave off the name of the page you want to link to. For example, to jump to the Tips section on this page, the following can be used:

[[#Tips | Jump to the top of this section ]]

One good example of this in action:

( Jump to the top of this section )

Use this feature sparingly - if someone renames the heading on a page not knowing you have linked to it, your link will break and just go to the top of the page as if there was no section bookmark. There is no way to tell when changing a section if there are links to it apart from checking every link to the page in turn, so it reduces maintainability to use these sorts of links too liberally.

Links - watch those plurals!

When creating a plural link, watch where your s goes. It can be a bit confusing and even frustrating at times and can potentially create needless duplication.

Try not to put it inside the link. Instead, have it flush against the link, like so [[Laser Pistol]]s . The wiki knows to make the S part of the link. Or you can use a pipe, like so: [[Laser Pistol | Laser Pistols]] but that's a bit tiresome.

Don't use [[Laser Pistols]] unless the actual title is indeed plural.

Note that you can use this same basic technique for participles and other suffixes as well in some cases, such as manufactured ([[manufacture]]d) for past participle, however you wouldnt be able to do the same for the present participle in this case (i.e., manufacturing), because of the vowel switch.

Stub Pages

Stub pages are simply placeholder pages that contain little to no information that will later be turned into a full article, or even a redirection page.

For existing authors, try not to litter the wiki with lots of little stub pages that you'll probably abandon through neglect or you've suddenly decided to go for a better document title. Only create stub pages when you know you'll be using them and try not to fill them with unhelpful comments like "The banana peel bomb. Uh, yeah. it's really powerful. Blast the aliens to bits tod days beyond tuesday." and leave it at that.

Tip If you have several unwanted stub pages, one excellent way of making sure that they don't go to waste is to move/rename them into the name of an article that has not yet been created, then fill in the page from there.

When creating Stub Pages

If you are creating a stub pages and can't think of anything to say, consider entering the following line:

 {{STUB}} 

This makes use of mediawiki's fascinating feature called transclusion (fills a page with another page) to insert the following message onto the page:

Stub This page is currently empty or currently missing key content. Possibly due to EXALT sabotage. Please help fight the alien menace by filling this page with relevant info. Remove this stub after the page has been completed to a minimum.

Which is marginally better than leaving it blank. This is a site-wide message.

Discussion

First and foremest, the wiki is not designed to be a discussion forum. But where needs arise, some discussion will have to take place on the wiki, as not all visitors will be members of the various forums the regular authors frequent.

There's a discussion link at the top of each page. If you have a comment or are unsure and want to ask a question, the discussion page is the best place to do it. If you find yourself having a frequent or a long discussion with another author in an existing article, consider moving to the discussion page to iron out all the details and then edit the main page to reflect the discussion. It's a lot better that having important ideas being lost in the multitude of text.

Remember to use the + button at the top of the discussion page to add comments rather than using the 'edit' button (unless it's the very first comment). Also remember to enter a brief discussion heading (there'll be a separate text box above the edit box for this) so that your new discussion topic stands out rather than ending up flush against the previous comment.

The discussion pages are like black boards. Remember to wipe them clean after you're done and all the changes are in effect.

Discussion : Separating

In a Talk: page, remember to separate any posts that you make so that your post doesn't end up looking like a continuation from the previous post. You have a wide variety of methods available to separate your posts.

If you use the + button to add your message, entering a title in the title textbox will automatically enter a section heading. See the section heading for more information on how to enter section headings manually.

You can also use horizontal lines. To create a horizontal line, enter five dashes (-----). To demonstrate:

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Lines are automatically inserted whenever a section heading is created, but sometimes a simple line is all you need.

Signing Off

If you're a registered user of this wiki board, sometimes you will want to leave a link back to your user page - if you have one. The Wiki has a shortcut that allows you to do this without having to type the entire link to your user page manually.

There are two ways of doing this. The first version is done by simply entering ~~~. This creates a link directly back to your user page and pipes the link to your user name.

The other version uses four tildes (~~~~). This does exactly the same as the there tilde shortcut, but it also appends the current date and time onto your piped user name. This is great way of time stamping any personal comments or discussions in talk pages, and it makes it much easier to follow a discussion on the talk page if you can tell who is saying what.

This shortcut will only take effect on the articles source when you finally save the document, however you will see the desired effect when previewing.

Indenting

The purpose of this section is to describe indenting. A line of indented text probably doesn't look like much, but it can certainly allow sections of large blocks of text to stand out a bit.

To indent a line, observe the following line.

: To indent a line, observe the following line. 

Notice how there's a colon at the start of the line. This indents the entire line of text. Note that this only works on the one line.

All text after the carriage return (the invisible character representing the enter/return key) will return to normal. Just like what has happened to this line, if you have a look at the source code. If you want to indent a large document, remember to place a ":" at the beginning of each new paragraph.

You can have multiple indent levels!

Observe.

See?

This can be handy for breaking up user discussions into threads

It helps break up the large blocks of unweildy text

Fnord!

How now brown cow? Where is my cow?

It has absconded with the kitchen sink

A life on the run for one that befriends a cat with boots is a sad one indeed.

Mind you

This is taking things to the extreme

And is just causing one big horrible mess.

But it'll hopefully get the point across

Be advised that if you place a semicolon ";" instead of a colon at the start of a new paragraph, it converts the entire paragraph into bold text. This can be a really handy way of making quick minor sub headings. If you place a ":" right after the title, separated by a space, you'll get a heading and an indented pargraph. This is useful for definitions. For example:

; This is the topic being explained : This is the description

Produces:

This is the topic being explained

This is the description

In this case, only one level of indent seems to work for the description, but you can indeed indent the entire definition, for example,

::; Indented Topic : Indented Topic description

Would produce:

Indented Topic

Indented Topic description