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 shall show you what you are able to do, and how you will do. Since the guid is written in a progressive way you can decide on your own, at which niveau your limit is, and stay there.

What prerequisites do I need?

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

To register or not to register?

To help the wiki you do not actually need to register. You are able to edit contents anonymously. However, registering will give you and other committers some benefits:

• You automatically watch the sites you edited. Future changes are sent to you by e-mail. You can read up the changes and if you disagree you're able to give feedback or even roll back the page. (You can unsubscribe from your watched pages at any time so don't worry about spam)
• Other commiters see whenever you have done a change and are able to give feedback or ask for unclear things on your profiles 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
• Site settings are stored in your profile. That's cool if you want to open a special default editor for edits, the wikia system comes with three at the moment.

What is the strategy to let me learn all this?

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

Basic rules you should keep in mind:

• If you do not know how to do some thing in a correct manner, don't do it. Always ask an experienced committer for tips before you mess things up. You are able to read out active committers by looking into the wiki page history. From there go to their profile, open the message wall and post a message.
• You should preferably use the Source Editor to edit your posts, because the classic and visual editor still have some bugs. This ends up in messed up page code without you knowing it. However, lets stick to the classic and visual editors yet to ease your start. Refer to the Learn to use the Source Editor guide for details on what fails on the other editors in Istaria Lexica.
• Do not mess up categories. Basic rule is: Adding one category is enough. Seldom you will need to add a second category to a page. Examples: a 'Creature' may also be a 'Golem'. If you are unsure about what to add, refer 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 another Committer 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 details should not be included on the quest page. The items should have their own page each. Since both of those page types come with proper templates, they are linked to each other almost automatically.

From easiest to hardest part, try out these guides:

• Leave a comment on an existing page
• Commit a screenshot to existing pages with an infobox
• Do/correct some texts on existing pages using visual editor
• Learn to use the Source Editor (Source Editor needed)

• How to extract long texts from the game

• Wiki editor's reference card much details about using the srource editor features