HammerWiki:Bonus help guide

[edit] Editing a Talk Page

When writing on a talk page you can use

== New section ==

=== Subsection ===

==== Sub-subsection ====

Normally only == New section == is required, and it's just used to signal a whole new topic to discuss.

On talk pages you use : to indent. Each time you reply to someone's edit you indent once.

You should also sign the edits you make to talk pages (but only the edits you make to talk pages), this can be done using ~~~~

Here's an example of a talk page discussion:

[edit] Taking about badass Armies

I reckon Greenskins would have to be the most badass army in WAR. --Example Guy 00:18, Dec 25, 2006 (CDT)

Ah that's what everybody says but you need to think outside the box, High Elves are obviously the winners, just look at their shiny helmets! --Bishop 00:20, 25 Dec 2006 (CDT)

Here's the code for the discussion above:

[edit] Editing a Page

Ok, moving on to editing a page: all articles have an edit tab at the top, click it to edit a page. Many articles are broken up into sections, it's usually easier to just click the edit text for a particular section.

The most important thing to bear in mind at this stage is to be bold. Hammerwiki needs to build up as much content about WAR as possible. Don't worry if your language isn't perfect, or if you haven't quite got the hang of wikicode... someone else is sure to come along and edit what you've written at some point. Which raises another very important tip: don't take it personally when someone edits your articles.

So once you've made your changes decide if your edit is a minor edit or not and mark the check box accordingly (the vast majority of edits made are minor). You may also find it useful to add an article to your watchlist. Before you save the page, it's generally a good idea to preview it first. Once you're happy with how it looks, add the edit Summary (a short sentence saying what your edit was is normally fine) and click Save Page.

For the basic ways to manipulate text such as: bolding and italicising, creating lists, etc. see here, here or here.

Editing wikis is generally straight forward but there are a few particularities to HammerWiki and wiki editing in general. I'm sure you'll learn plenty has you go but here are some tips to get you started:

1. The editing help page is quite useful (a link to it appears each time you go to edit a page). HammerWiki:How to help is also a good starting place.
2. There's more editing help here, here and here.
3. Please don't wikify links (putting [[]] around a word) multiple times throughout an article. Wikifying the first occurrence is almost always sufficient.
4. Create an account, it's easier to keep track of your edits, allows people to discuss things with you and gives your edits more authority.
5. Don't write questions on an article, use its talk page to ask questions related to the article.
6. When editing a page, try to make your summary comment short and relevant, it helps out those who are watching the Recent changes.
7. To upload a picture, click the "Upload image" link on the left nav bar. When uploading pictures, don't use the BMP format, use PNG or JPEG (or in certain unusual circumstances GIF) but don't reduce the quality on JPEGs too much. It's usually a good idea to shrink large pictures to a reasonable file size (150kb or less).
8. You can and often should add pages you edit to your watchlist (use the Watch tab up the top).
9. Sign your Talk page edits with ~~~~, don't sign your article edits though!
10. We only capitalise the first word of articles, unless it's a proper noun. E.g. Chaos plague has a lowercase "p" but Bright Wizard has both the "B" and "W" capitalised.
11. Keep spelling standard across an article, don't use both Commonwealth and American English spelling the same article. In the sentence above I've written "capitalise" so I'd now write standardised instead of standardized to keep it standardised.
12. If you need to experiment, you can create test pages off your user page, E.g. User:Pendrako/help or you can use the HammerWiki:Sandbox.
13. Before you jump in and create an article you should see if there is an existing style guide. This makes life much easier and keeps everything standard. Note - these mostly still need creating for HammerWiki.
14. Category:Policies contains rules/policy articles that apply here to help get you started, which are important and should be read.

[edit] Creating a page

Well the next logical step is learning how to create a page. Firstly by using the search on the left nav bar, make sure that the relevant page doesn't already exist. In particular make sure you try adding or subtracting an "s".

Once you're sure that a relevant page doesn't already exist you can go ahead and create the article. There's several of ways of doing this, probably the easiest is to type the name you want to use for the article into the search field and hit Go. Once the page loads, click on the create this page link. When creating article names, don't use all capitals (unless it's a proper noun or the game uses capitals for it), see HammerWiki:Use lower case for more info.

The tips that apply to editing an existing article also apply to creating a new page.

[edit] Moving a page

Moving a page on the HammerWiki is not difficult but there's a few things to bear in mind. Firstly you need to decide if this is a simple move that nobody is likely to have any objections to (such as an article spelt incorrectly, things in your namespace etc.) or one that needs to be discussed first? If so you need to add the move template to the top of the article ({{move|Name of article to move to}} and say on the talk page why you think the article should be moved. If you're confident that the article is ready to be moved, use the move tab up the top (next to history). The old article will still exist, it will just redirect to the new one. At this stage you need to go back to the old article and click on left navbar link What links here and so you can then edit all the pages the have links to the old article and update them to link to the new article. When no pages link to the old article you can decide if you want to keep the old page or add the delete tag.

[edit] Quirks of wiki editing

Ok here's quirky things you can do on a wiki:

• To directly link to something put a : in front it it. I.e. [[:Image:dragon concept.jpg]]. This is useful for things like linking to an image without showing it and for linking to categories without actually adding the article to the category.
• If you want to display some text directly you can use <nowiki> </nowiki> and the text inside the nowiki tags will not be wikified.
• To create a redirect, replace any content on a page with #Redirect [[Page to redirect to]]

Waaagh!

• If you want to improve the way you use images, [[Image:WAR-orcsymbol 02.gif]] is the simplest way to add an image, but you can change the images size, [[Image:WAR-orcsymbol 02.gif|25px]] will decrease the size to 25 pixels wide. You can see what this looks like below. Finally, [[Image:WAR-orcsymbol 02.gif|right|frame|Waaagh!]] will add a frame, which you can see to the right.

[edit] Maintenance Help

If you find an article has been vandalised, go to the history of the article (it's a tab up the top), find the most recent unvandalised revision, select it, go to edit, copy the text out then open up the article again and save the old copy. The easiest way to detect vandalism is to keep track of the Recent Changes and use the "(diff)" link to see what's been changed. To request a ban on a user who's been vandalising the GuildWiki, go to their User Page and add the following {{ban|reason for banning|vandalized article}}

If you can see an article that you think should be deleted, you can flag this using {{delete|reason for deletion}} on the articles page. If it's obvious, that may be sufficient, if you think other users may object you should explain your reason for wanting the article deleted on its talk page.

There are quite a few other flags we use, see Category:Templates/Notices for a some lists.

[edit] User/Talk Pages

You user page is a place to put some information about you (and eventually your WAR characters). It is your own page so you can largely do what you like with it, within reason. If you use another user's user page as inspiration, please declare this on your user page. Many of us work hard on the design of our user pages so give credit where it's due. If a user has requested that you don't copy a part of their user page, please respect that.

Your talk page (aka discussion page) is where others can leave a note for you, questions, comments etc. and you can do the same on the talk pages of other users. Although you have a high level of freedom on your talk page, it is important to note that you shouldn't blank/remove parts of your talk page. If it's getting full, create an archive by making a new page (e.g. User talk:Pendrako/Archive1) then move the current contents of your talk page to your new archive page. You could also leave some of the more recent comments and just archive the discussion sections that you feel have been resolved.

[edit] Conclusion

• Have a look over our policy pages so you don't accidentally do the wrong thing, we don't have that many rules here and use common sense as often as you can.
• Also watch your language, we don't swear here, anybody of any age or background should be able to read the content here.
• When editing an article, even a simple edit, check out HammerWiki:Style and formatting so you know your edit doesn't throw things out of whack and you may even tidy up the article a little ;)
• This is not a replacement for the helping out pages such as HammerWiki:Community Portal, HammerWiki:Editing guide and HammerWiki:How to help, this is just to provide an extra bit of help should anyone need it.