Help:Introduction
Welcome to the Lotro-Wiki! We are a dedicated wiki fan-site for Lord of the Rings Online (Lotro) and pride ourselves in supplying information and guides to enhance your gaming experience. This site is for players by players!
These Help pages will serve as your guide as you begin (and continue!) to contribute to the wealth of information on our site. Becoming accustomed to wiki editing can be a daunting task, and even if you have experience on Wikipedia, Wikia, and other community-edited webpages, you may find some things work differently here at Lotro-Wiki.
This page will provide some general background information for working on Lotro-Wiki. If you'd like to skip right to learning how to edit, jump ahead to Editing. For useful articles addressing more specific or advanced topics, browse through Contents.
How it Works
Lotro-Wiki uses MediaWiki, which is the same software used on Wikipedia. Almost every page on the site can be edited and updated by our members (anyone who creates a free account). Pages can also be moved, locked, and deleted by editors with additional user privileges.
What are Pages?
- Commonly used synonyms are article, document, and text-file.
You are reading a page right now. Clicking on a link takes you to another page. On a wiki all pages are connected by links so that visitors easily can browse the site.
Pages are added whenever new content appears in the game. Or if something should be explained and a suitable page does not exist already. Or if a page has grown too large and would serve better if split in several pages.
Wiki Markup
Pages rarely contain just plain text but rather headers, formatted text, links, images, tables, etc., to create rich, informative, and attractive articles. For that we use wiki-markup, which ranges from very simple to quite complex things, and sometimes constructs bordering to programming languages.
Categories
All pages should be tagged for one or more categories, see Help:Categorization. Links to categories are always found at the bottom of a page.
A category should be tagged for one or more "parent categories". Hence, all categories form a hierarchical tree with Category:Lord of the Rings Online as root. That tree provides a great overview of all pages, and it is an essential and powerful tool at Lotro-Wiki.
Page History
Since multiple editors are modifying a large number of pages, the history is another key feature of MediaWiki. That history includes every change to a page, stretching many years back. All pages can easily be restored to a previous version if needed, also from the "trash bin".
Always add a summary when saving a change, at least for anything more than very simple changes. The history, with those summaries, is a great place to start when having questions about an article.
The link Recent changes, in the left-hand column of every page, will display the most recent history. Pages you have edited, or tagged as favourites, are shown in bold text, so that you can see if somebody else has updated "your" page.
Talk (Discussion) Pages
Every page has a tab named Discussion at the top left of the page, though links to those are named Talk. There editors can chat about the page, or explain reasoning behind possibly-controversial edits. Many articles do not yet have a talk page (red links), while other talk pages are so highly trafficked they even have archived discussions dating back to the beginning of this wiki.
The link Recent discussions, in the left-hand column, will show the most recently changed talk pages.
Getting Involved
Anyone can contribute to Lotro-Wiki, whether to fix an annoying typo, update some stats, offer a suggestion, or add new material. The first step is to create an account, this is a requirement but membership is free. The following section explains the first few actions new community members may wish to do.
Your User Page
As a new member you are given a unique user page. See the links at the top right of any wiki page, such as this one (they may be red if not yet created).
- The first link is your user-name for the account and it is your very own "user page". Many users write briefly about themselves, or they use the page to collect useful links, etc., but please see Code of Conduct.
- If your user page has not yet been created, click the red link and find a blank edit box. Type a quick line about yourself and click the "Show preview" button under the editor. That is how your page would look like if you had saved it. For now you can save your user page, until knowing more about wiki-markup.
- However, perhaps someone else has created a user page for you with just a link to Category:Users at the bottom of the page. You may click Edit near the top of the page and add more text to it, but please keep the category tag there.
- If your user page has not yet been created, click the red link and find a blank edit box. Type a quick line about yourself and click the "Show preview" button under the editor. That is how your page would look like if you had saved it. For now you can save your user page, until knowing more about wiki-markup.
Your Talk Page
At the top of any wiki-page, there is a link to your talk page next to your account name. At this other users may communicate with you, and you may communicate on theirs. For more detail, see Talk Page Etiquette.
If you just created your account the link will be red. However, somebody may have added a friendly "Welcome!" message to it. That welcome message contains useful links and tips, and it will automatically update if its "master page" is updated, so please keep it around for the time being.
- Notice: If somebody updates your talk page you will see an alert (a yellow banner with some text) the next time you load any wiki-page, assuming you are logged in. You may also receive an email alert if you have added an address to your account, see Preferences next to the talk page link.
A Character Page
Many players wish to create a page to tell the story of their in-game character(s) (see example). This is the easy way to do this:
- Make certain you are logged in
- Review Template:Player Character
- Click Create new character, add the name of the character, and click the create-button
- Fill in the details of your character, explained at the template page, preview until satisfied, and save
- Now visit your user-page, create an entry like
* [[User:<your-user-name>/<character-name>]]
(without < >) and save. You will see a bullet list with a link to the new character-page, a list you may wish to extend with more characters in due time.
The character-page is a "sub-page" to your user-page.
User Sub-pages
In a future you may want to create user sub-pages for other purposes. The simplest way is to search for User:<user-name>/<wanted-page-name> and at the search-result page click on the red link and continue from there.
Summation
Just a final note. After you have edited a page you might see somebody else edit "your" edit. Please, do not take it personal; like you do others also want Lotro-Wiki to be perfect, and they thought they could improve even further. Most likely your edit caught their interest for a page they had not read in a long while, if ever. And another day you will do the same.
That about wraps up this introduction to Lotro-Wiki! To tackle page editing more directly, you may want to read through Editing.
For more advanced topics, see Contents, or take a look at the navigation boxes below. Happy wiki-ing!
Next guide: Help:Editing
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