User:Kymtastic/sandbox

This is where I'll be drafting a General Formatting/Practices and Processes page. I have no idea where it should rightly go, as I don't believe there is a wiki meta namespace, nor how it should be titled in the end... but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Discussion is encouraged on the discussion page!

In Progress:

• Integrate Category:Example pages info, esp. rituals and wizards.

To Do:

• o.o I seem to be close to finishing this project, finally? I suppose I should get some feedback and figure out where to put this beast!

The Draft:

This General Formatting article documents standard formatting practices for the wiki. Users are encouraged to view this page as an ever-evolving community resource and not hard rules. Focus on the fun of adding content first and someone can always come along later to fuss with formatting. We only ask that you use the Stub template to mark any incomplete articles.

If you believe an article does not belong on the wiki, please use the Delete template to mark the page and include your reasoning. The most likely reason for this would be duplicate articles.

Introductory Concepts

So, you want to edit the wiki [1]. You've intuited the use of the "edit" tab at the top of every page but your palms get sweaty just thinking about selecting it. Let's fix that!

In order to edit you must have an account on the wiki. The Login/Create Account page should give you a list of members who have the permissions to create one for you if you do not already have one.

Once you have your account it's time to select the edit tab and fix that thing that's bothered you for months. If the page is long and the content you want to edit is contained within a section of the page you can select the "edit" link beside the relevant section header.

Before you submit:

• Summarize your changes in the Summary field. Even if you add or remove just a single letter, properly documenting your update can help future editors utilizing the page's "history" tab.
• Decide if your edit is a major or minor edit. Selecting the "This is a minor edit" tick box is another way of increasing the ability to quickly scan and understand updates on the history tab. A minor edit tends to be correcting typos or adding markup to words. A major edit tends to be updating or adding new information. Just use your best judgement as your summary will always be more useful.
• Copy the updated content and, if you're paranoid or have been working for a while, paste it somewhere safe. Besides potential issues of disconnection or disaster on the user's end, sometimes the wiki goes down. This is the most paranoiac and potentially unnecessary step but keep in mind that Stuff Happens.
• Preview your changes with the Show preview button. Usually a tiny change is no big deal... until you realize you deleted an important character that dramatically changed the formatting. Better to be overly cautious and Always Be Previewing. Previewing also can act as a "save point" to a limited extent, in that sometimes preview data can be recovered by a browser upon refresh and, depending upon your browser settings, the Summary field history is saved upon submission. We do not recommend drafting this way, but it's still useful to know if the wiki decides to go down before you can hit "Save page". Previewing also helps keep the volume of edits down. Even the "best" editors have submitted a major edit and re-read it only to find a typo. Or two.

Language

As with the MUD itself, British English is the default language of the wiki. Double spacing between sentences can be helpful for legibility during editing but the wiki renders with single spaces, regardless.

Naming articles

A page name for a character, armour, or weapon would be the same as their short name on the MUD. Redirects should be made for other, less formal names. This can be done by creating a new page for the informal name with the code #REDIRECT [[Primary Article]], replacing "Primary Article" with the relevant destination.

Player shops should be created with the same name that is on the rental agreement (the address of the shop), as shop names can change.

If there's more than one page that would end up with the same name we add words in parenthesis, ex. short sword (custom), to differentiate them.

Opening sentence

The opening sentence of every article should include the article title to the best of your ability, formatted in [[internal link]] or '''bold'''. Internal links used to reference the current article simply display as bold text. Leave any parenthesis from the article name out of this sentence, ex. the "Katana (custom weapon)" article name could be introduced with something like, "A custom katana differs from..."

Markup

Markup is wiki code used to format content. While the wiki can handle html if you must, markup is far easier to read and keeps the wiki uniform.

The Discworld MUD Wiki runs on the Mediawiki framework, much like Wikipedia. These outside sources provide thorough references for editors:

• MediaWiki Formatting Help
• Wikipedia Wikitext Help

Keep in mind that due to version and template differences, some markup may differ or not exist from these links.

When commenting on a Talk (Discussion) page or in certain Research scenarios, please remember to sign your comments with -~~~~, which will look something like: -Kymtastic (talk) 18:11, 6 March 2020 (EST)

Enjoy some basic markup for your perusal and reference:

Text Formatting
Description	Input	Output
Italic	''italic''	italic
Bold	'''bold'''	bold
Bold & Italic	'''''bold & italic'''''	bold & italic
Escape Markup	<nowiki>no [[wiki]] ''markup''</nowiki>	no [[wiki]] ''markup''
Bullet list	* Line breaks <br />don't break levels. ** More asterisks give deeper *** and deeper levels.	Line breaks don't break levels. More asterisks give deeper and deeper levels.
Numbered list	# Line breaks <br />don't break levels. ## More number signs give deeper ### and deeper levels.	Line breaks don't break levels. More number signs give deeper and deeper levels.
Definition	;item 1 : definition 1	item 1 definition 1
Indent	: Single indent :: Double indent ::::: Multiple indent	Single indent Double indent Multiple indent

Link Formatting
Description	Input	Output
Internal Links
Internal Link	[[Main Page]] [[Special:Categories]]	Main Page Special:Categories
Piped Link	[[Special:Categories|List of all Categories]] [[#Templates|Go to section on same page]]	List of all Categories Go to section on same page
Pipe Trick (skips namespace)	[[User:Kymtastic|]]	Kymtastic
Suffixing Links	[[Time]]s	Times
Link to Category	[[:Category:Items]]	Category:Items
Link to File	[[:File:Am.png]]	File:Am.png
External Links
External Link	[https://mediawiki.org MediaWiki]	MediaWiki
Numbered External Link (please avoid in favor of <ref> tag)	[https://mediawiki.org]	[2]

Ref tag

The <ref> </ref> tag is preferred in place of numbered external links. Text within the ref tags is not shown in-line and instead will populate wherever <references /> is placed. On this wiki, that would be under a header titled "References" near the foot of the page. For more information and examples, see Wikimedia's citation page.

Images

Images are essentially an internal link preceded by the "File" namespace, ex. [[File:example.jpg|caption]]. For more information and examples, see Wikimedia's images page.

Tables

Tables can get a little complicated to explain, so we'll leave it to Wikipedia's table page.

Quoting the MUD

For descriptions and other things from the mud (or text maps) use <pre>. The now largely deprecated {{prebox}} is functionally the same, except it allows some wiki markup such as links, bolding, italicizing, etc.

Use <code> for MUD commands/syntax in the middle of sentences. Italic, bold, and "quotes" have been used in the past - quotes break up the sentence more so we tend to prefer that as the alternative.

Page layouts by content type

For new editors it can be a good idea to find an object or location similar to the page you plan to add and copy+paste its code as a base to edit from. For those who would prefer to start afresh or are looking to makeover older pages, the wiki provides some example pages to use as templates.

Items

Some items, such as blue water or lockpicks, do not currently have a template. Recommended headings include: Location/Obtaining, Use, Effects, Types. These misc items should be included in [[Category:Items]] or a relevant Items subcategory.

Armour

Use the armour formatting page as a guideline. A Category is unnecessary, as the armour infobox will automatically assign one based on the coverage type(s).

Weapons

Follow the basic steps for adding weapons to the wiki, such as weighing, measuring, judging, etc. Use the weapon formatting page as a guideline. Adding a Category is unnecessary, as the weapon infobox will automatically assign one based on the weapon type.

Locations

Player Shop

Use the player shop formatting page as a guideline.

Terrain

Use the terrain formatting page as a guideline. You will not need to fill in information for every season! Fill in what values you can, or at least create the page and then use the Research tab to list your findings. If you are satisfied that the range of values are correct for a season, you can remove the relevant "<season> needed" template.

Magic

Priest Rituals

Use the ritual formatting page as a guideline.

Wizard Spells

User the Wizard spell formatting page as a guideline.

Advanced Concepts

Namespaces

Namespaces help organize all wiki content and sometimes come with special properties. You can easily identify a namespace by looking at the URL, as every namespace except (Main) will appear as a prefix in the title, ex. <namespace>:Pagetitle.

Articles about the Discworld MUD itself are under the (Main) namespace, which is the default and therefore does not prefix the title in the URL. The default search on the wiki includes only the (Main) namespace but this can be expanded with an advanced search. Category is another namespace you're probably already familiar with!

Three other frequently used namespaces are Talk, User, and File. Every article has a Discussion link that will create or link to a Talk:Pagetitle page where users can speak at a meta-level about the page and its formatting or information. User namespaces allow editors to sandbox and create personal pages that are linked to their username, which might be signed on a Talk page or documented on a page's history. The File namespace is where all of our uploads live and is a good example of a namespace that gives its page special properties, as you can see. Try to edit the page and you'll find you can only control the file's description! That's because the old file versions and list of pages using the file are automagically generated due to its namespace.

For further information, check out the Wikimedia Namespace Helpfile.

Templates

Templates are essentially shortened code that allow users to plug in variables. For example, some of the more frequent templates an editor might use include:

• Money Templates - ex. Template:Dollars in use &&&&&&&&&&+20120 A$50.30
• Link Templates - ex. Devblog links to a Developer Blog post.
• Template:Prehidden - Hides spoiler-adjacent information, most frequently used to refer to quests.
• Volume Templates - An invisible friend, you won't know they're there until you're using the values in a sortable table and it sorts properly despite different measurements being used!
• Infoboxes - Usually located at the top right of a page to show quick facts from the article.
• Navboxes - Usually located at the bottom of a page to help navigate an expansive topic, like pages related to a guild.

When on a template page, using the What Links Here tool (available on the left side of every page when logged in) can allow you to see how others have used the template on older pages. This can be essential, as some templates exist purely to be used in a more all-encompassing template and will look wrong / throw errors on its own. Always preview, but especially when using an unfamiliar template for the first time.

A full list of Templates available on the wiki exists but please be careful in using them for the above reasons. The best advice is to use a template you already see in use in an article, but the full list can be useful when you know there's a relevant template and just can't quite remember the name off the top of your head!

While template use is encouraged, it is recommended that those unfamiliar to wiki editing exercise caution when making changes to templates, as they affect multiple pages.

For further information, check out the Wikimedia Templates Helpfile. Looking up what you intend with a template can be helpful in preventing confusion between expectation and reality. For example, "when a category link is contained in a template, however, [an update to the article's categories] does not happen immediately: instead, whenever a template is edited, all the pages that transclude it are put into the job queue to be recached during periods of low server load" is the kind of detail that isn't intuitive and might lead an editor to think their code was incorrect and make unnecessary panic edits afterward, when the code was sound all along and the wiki simply needed time to process.