Welcome to wiki Editing! This is part of the Community series on helping people know where to start as a new Wiki Guardian. This will cover the essentials beyond the basics of Adding Pages, Getting Started on Editing, Dealing with trolls and vandals and the Getting started guide. Feel free to update with other ideas and suggestions if you're a more advanced or hardcore moderators, so hit that edit and onwards toward contributing!
Where To Begin[ | ]
Often a wiki can be overrun with a mess of pages and articles everywhere without much interaction between them, so an easy start is to go through the pages that you've already contributed to and edit in some links to other pages. Adding simple icons before or after links about an item or a weapon from the game can do wonders for the visual side of the page.
- Adding Images - The best way we've found to add various images from a game (either screenshots or icons, that have been edited) is to pick a category such as Category:Icons, and edit that page. You'll see a little "Drop files here" bar at the top (see right →) which you can add files into and begin the upload process. Uploading into the category page will automatically add the given category to the image, which will make things simpler to find if you need to in the future.
- Categories - On the above note that images should all be categorized, you should make sure to add a category to each page, and image, as well as to categorize each of the categories that you use so you don't end up with orphaned pages or files lost from the world departed from the rest of the wiki. You don't want to make any pages lonely or cry now do you? Adding categories enables the wiki to network itself, and helps everything connect.
- Templates - Templates are a bit more tricky for the beginner, but by no means difficult. The basics are that with a template you can make stuff simpler by only needing repeating content once. Templates like infoboxes can really help out a wiki's visual side by having a bar with information, or having links to other common items in a category at the bottom. There's not really a limit of things you can do with templates, they just need to be thought up and implemented. Feel free to grab and reuse templates from other wikis with edits to your liking as they're highly configurable!
→ See in action: Darkest Dungeon's Hero Infobox or Dota 2's Equipment Footer Box - Special:SpecialPages - From the sidebar under Tools you can access the Special pages on any wiki, which will open up a variety of tools and give you access to see reports on all sorts of things. As a mod, everything under the Maintenance reports is really quite handy and you can learn to take full advantage of the links.
- The Administrators guide - If you haven't already seen it, the admin guide is a handy resource that covers tons of information on how to be a good wiki guardian and is a highly recommended guide to follow this one.
Beyond The Basics[ | ]
If you still find yourself getting lost around the wiki, consider adding or making changes to the front/main page to make simple modifications for easier user flow. Feel free to add in links to pages that might get lost, or what you would consider high use pages that people using the wiki would typically search for if it's not immediately accessible. Requiring less than 3-4 links from the main page to find any page on the wiki is recommended. Beyond that, check out the other important things and additions below...
- Watchlist certain pages - Consider adding important pages to your watchlist, things like the community portal, or the admin noticeboard will be important to have, since you'll get updates by notification when people are looking for help. By default any page as well as that page's Talk page which you've contributed to will be added to your to watchlist, so you'll be informed if someone is having an issue with it. If in the future you no longer wish to receive notifications you can simply "unstar" the page.
- Deleting pages - Default users won't have access to delete pages and files once they've created them, (also spam pages) so you'll need to check the Candidates for deletion category on your wiki to keep it clean. Consider blanking the page and using Redirects if it's a similar name before you totally delete a page.
- Special:NewPages & Special:WantedPages - This is where you're going to see issues form or new developments on the wiki emerge, so checking more often than not will give you a heads up especially with a ton of new content.
- Inviting Others - If you're a huge fan of the game or excited about a release, you're probably on the forums or involved in other communities for the game, and you're bound to run into people who might not yet know about the game's wiki. Word of mouth and your excitement for the wiki is probably one of the best factors in getting other active members involved.
Advanced Moderating[ | ]
- Style Guides - If you are moderating a larger wiki, consider putting together and adding a style guide for the wiki. Typically you'll want to keep some uniformity with images or templates, so the colors and look of a wiki will be compatible.
→ For inspiration see ARK Style Guide or Minecraft Style Guide. - Wiki Rules - Likewise with style guides, as the community grows consider adding or suggesting a community written page for Wiki Rules that can be updated with guidelines for the community's game. Ofttimes people will tend to just spam their youtube videos to get likes, so those can be discouraged by having specific rules for given situations. Obviously each community as it grows will have specific issues that need to be addressed.
→ Feel free to check out ARK Rules or Minecraft Rules if you need ideas on specific rules that could be implemented. - Advanced Templates - If you're a coder, or good with programming, consider adding templates that will make pagetime load much faster or a template that can cut down on the necessary input from a user, to provide complex reasonings.
- Join in the Slack Conversation - If you wish to join the conversation and get ideas or help from other admins around gamepedia and the other wikis, please feel to contact a Gamepedia Wiki Mod, who can set you up with an invite.
What's Expected[ | ]
Honestly the wikis at gamepedia are completely reliant on users like you, people interested in adding and expanding to the community. That being said, really it's up to whatever is in your interest or what you feel is great for the given wiki, be it adding images, creating quality content or simply Patrolling the dark streets with your high and mighty Achievements. We'd like however to encourage you to maintain a standard for grammar and punctuation, and when contributing content to write your articles in a way that you'd expect from other authors. When adding deeper content, consider the page you're contributing to be something in an entry for an encyclopedia article.
Wiki Contributing Is Addictive[ | ]
At Gamepedia, we totally understand and we're here to help you, so if you have any questions, issues or have an idea for the future, please contact your local Gamepedia Wiki Managers. Did we do it right (How to Create a Great Guide or Tutorial)?