The Gifted's guide to the Istaria Lexica Wiki

Greetings, Gifted. Once you have read this guide you are gifted enough to help the Istaria Wiki out, in any matter you wish to. The guide itself shall show yourself what you are able to do, and how you can do. Since it is written in a progressive way you are able decide on your own, at which niveau your limits are and work stuff there.

What prerequisites do I need?

None. Absolutely none at all. Well almost. If you posted on discussion boards in the world wide web you probably did that by using a small editor window. The editing on wikis works pretty much the same way. If you ever used [Microsoft Word] or the [Openoffice Word Processor] you do have more than enough knowledge to start up.

To register or not to register?

You do not actually need to register. You are able to edit contents anonymously. However, registering will give you and other helpers very cute benefits:

• You automatically watch the articles you edit. Future changes are sent to you by e-mail if you want so. You can then review the changes and if you disagree you're able to give a direct feedback, or you may even roll back the article's state. Don't worry, your e-mail address is hidden at any time.
• Other commiters also see whenever you made a change and are able to give feedback or ask for unclear things, using your profile's message wall. This improves the quality of commits from you and others.
• You may become administrator. Not that this would be a honorable job ;-)
• You can leave some nice information about your person or your ingame characters on your profile page.
• Certain site preferences are stored in your profile. For example you could disable the syntax coloring for the editor, or tell the system what to mail you and what not.

What is the strategy to let me learn all this?

That's the major question, isn't it?

Three basic rules you should keep in mind:

• If you do not know how to do something in a correct manner, don't. Ask an experienced committer prior. You are able to find active people on the wiki's page history and the Special:ActiveUsers page. From there, visit their profile and open their talk page. Leaving a message there is a good way to get in touch.
• Do not mess up categories. The common guideline is: Adding one category is enough. Seldom you will want to add another category to a page. Examples: a 'Creature' may also be a 'Golem'. If you are unsure about what to add, compare your article to other similar pages (ex. Marble Golem and Marble Boulder Golem are talking about the same thing: A golem which is made of stone). Or ask others for a heads up.
• Keep pages as atomised as possible. If you want to add a quest where you have to loot an item, the item's details should not be included on the quest page. Items desire their own page. Both of those page types come with proper templates which link to each other automatically (ooooh yessss!).

Learning wiki: a list of guides

These guides deliver you the most details you need. They are sorted from easiest to the most difficult.

• Leave a comment on an existing page
• Commit a screenshot to existing pages with an infobox
• Do/correct some texts on existing pages
• Advanced Editing

• How to extract long texts from the game

The Wiki editor's reference card

We've created a spreadsheet for the work on our wiki. It delivers internal information about everything you could ever need:

• Available Categories
• Available Templates
• Deeper guides (external links) into wiki code and syntax
• Short links to very useful wiki functions
• -----> Wiki editor's reference card