Help:Editing

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Revision as of 20:36, 20 March 2018 by Ravanel (talk | contribs) (→‎Deleting your page: Rewrote wonky sentence.)
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It is easy to get overwhelmed or confused when first starting to edit here on LOTRO-wiki. Hopefully these quick tips will give you a starting point.

What you need to know to start

First off, a basic understanding of a "Wiki" is assumed. You may wish to start with Help:Introduction for an overview of Lotro-Wiki, or see the Wikipedia page on the subject if you're not sure how it works.

Basic Wiki page layout

Figuring out how the site functions is an important first step to becoming a savvy editor. To do that, you'll need to become familiar with the different options available for interacting with wiki pages.

The View tabs

Look at the top of this page. At the top left of the screen, immediately to the right of the big golden Lotro-Wiki logo, you'll find two "tabs." These will appear on almost every page of the wiki, although they might look slightly different depending on the kind of page you're working on.

  • Page: The first tab is your default view, where you can see the information - like this little guide - that has been written on a page. You'll notice that, on this page, this tab is labeled "Help page" (although it may be in another language if you've selected a localization preference). If you visit the Main Page, this tab will simply read "Page," and if you look at Item:Minstrel's Friend, it will say "Item." This tab is a good hint of the sort of content you're looking at right now.
  • Discussion: The second tab is the Discussion tab, where you can ask questions or discuss topics relating to the information on that page. If you click the discussion tab right now, you'll probably see some comments that editors made when they were working on this page. These discussion pages are intended mostly for other editors, so they're not a good place to ask for help in-game, or to report a game bug. Also, if you have information to add to the article, or corrections to make, you can usually just edit it right in instead of using the discussion tab. Good uses for the discussion tab might be to ask if something is still accurate, to point out an error that you're not sure about yet, or to let people know what ideas and plans you have for improving a large page.

If either of those two tabs are in red text, that means the page has not yet been created. This is not unusual for Discussion pages.

The Editing tabs

To the right of the View tabs, you'll find three tabs on the top right side of the screen (to the left of the search box). These are the tabs that make wiki-editing possible.

  • Read: This is the default mode, for just reading the information on a page. While Reading, you can't make any changes to the page content. If you click the Read tab while editing a page (see the next bullet) any changes that you have made are not saved , making this a convenient "throw this away" action.
  • Edit: This is where the magic happens. This tab will allow you to edit all the text and "markup" on a page, so you can add, correct, and update! There are some things that you can't change with the Edit tab, like the left navigation bar and the title of the page, but as you learn more and more editing techniques you'll be able to build some seriously complex pages.
  • View History: shows you all the edits that have contributed to that page over time.

The Editing tabs work together with the View tabs, so you can Read content on a page, switch to the discussion tab and View History, then switch back to the page and Edit.

Where do I start?

There are two basic processes on the Wiki:

  1. Creating a new page.
  2. Modifying (editing) an existing page.

Find some part of LOTRO-wiki that interests you, and that you would like to spend time updating.

Don't have a clue on where to start looking? Hit the Random page on the side-bar a few times. You could stumble across different items, quests, monsters, skills, deeds, or more!
Once you find something you want to work on, take some time just looking at the code of the existing pages. Try to get a feel for how things work by comparing the code to how the page looks.
Here is where using the Read and Edit tabs allow you to "toggle" back and forth between the two without being concerned with changes.
  • Note that it is quite useful to "know your browser" ... so that you can open each tab in a separate Window or Browser tab and refer to them that way, possibly even side by side!
Want some specific ideas to start from? See if any of the following sound interesting:
  • Monster Drops -- Fight mobs and verify/add what items they drop. Then use Category:Creatures as an index to find them.
  • Gear Stats -- Compare the gear items in your inventory or the auction house with the stats displayed here. Then use Category:Items as an index to find them.
  • Quest Text/Rewards -- Verify/update the information here with the quests you are currently running in-game. Use the search function to find the particular quest.
These tools exist for the most commonly created pages on LOTRO-wiki. They should be use by all contributors when creating pages of those types.
See the "Editor: Article Creation "Templates" section of the Help page for a listing of them.

Let's edit!

Now that you know where to click, go ahead and give it a try (if you haven't already). If you click the Edit tab above (you'll probably want to open this in a new tab if your browser supports it so you can continue reading), you'll notice that this whole guide is written entirely in plain text with some random symbols here and there. These symbols, or "wiki markup," give us everything from small formatting changes to complicated image galleries and more.

Here's a quick table listing some of the markup that's used on this page:

Markup code Example Description
''text'' text Placing two apostrophes (single quotes) on either side of some text will italicize that text.
'''text''' text Using three apostrophes (single quotes) will change the text to boldface.
[[Help:Contents]] Help:Contents Enclosing the name of a wiki page in double square brackets creates a hyperlink to that page. This is known as an "internal link" or "wikilink" because it only works for pages on Lotro-Wiki.com.
[[Help:Contents|Start here!]] Start here! You can rename a wikilink by including a "pipe" character (usually just above the Return key, although your keyboard may differ) and then some alternate text after the name of the wiki page. In this example, the link points to Help:Contents, but it displays "Start here!"
=== Text === none Surrounding some text with matching sets of 2 to 6 equals signs will transform it into a header, making it large and bold and using it as an anchor for the table of contents.
Some text

: Some more text

Some text
Some more text
Indenting text on a line can be done by beginning the line with a colon character. This is very useful for keeping conversations organized on discussion pages.

* Apples
* Oranges
* Mangosteens

  • Apples
  • Oranges
  • Mangosteens
A bulleted list is created by prefacing each list item with an asterisk. Similarly with the colon used for indentation, the asterisk must be the first character on the line for the formatting to kick in.

This is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can be accomplished with wiki markup. Lotro-Wiki is a relatively clean installation of the MediaWiki software and, while it lacks some of the bells and whistles of highly-customized environments like Wikia, retains most of the core functionality you might find on sites:

Now that you have a better idea of what's happening on this page, feel free to correct any typos on this page, or improve anything that wasn't clearly written.

Always use the Preview option of the editing window before saving any changes.

Everybody makes mistakes, even the experienced editors, and it's very simple to catch most of them by previewing your work BEFORE saving it.

Deleting your page

If you decide you want to delete your page or an image you uploaded you can place a deletion request at the top of the page using the {{Delete Page|<reason>}} template e.g.

Users, Ninjas and editors must request pages for deletion. Pages so tagged wind up in Category:Articles for deletion, which is reviewed by Administrators.


Using color on a page