| About & Help |
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About |
How to contribute
There are many things you can do to contribute even if you are not an experienced wiki user. For instance:
Contents
1 Improving existing articles |
Improving existing articles
You can improve existing articles that are very short, in need of copy-editing, have some sections that can be expanded, or have been flagged for some other reason. Pages in the Workshop are too short to even be considered articles, but are capable of being expanded into articles step by step.
Because this wiki deals with fandom issues that nobody has ever written down, the personal experiences and memories of people who "were there when it happened" is very important to the wiki. For example, articles about memes definitely benefit from having people add to them who know how those memes came into being. Articles in need of some expert attention can be found here. (Don't worry if you don't consider yourself an expert; if you know something about the topic that isn't already on the page, add it!)
Or of course you can just browse the wiki, and if you see anything that needs fixing or expanding in your opinion, don't be afraid to do so.
Creating new pages
You can also create a new article about a topic you're familiar with (a favorite fan fic, for instance, or a character who does not yet have a page of his or her own). If you're not sure how, you can check out these guides written by experienced editors; they contain instructions and suggestions for the most popular types of pages. By using the page creation fields on that page or the front page, you can access adapted versions of those guides while you are creating a new article.
You are not required to use these guides, however. You can also look at an existing page the structure of which you like and try to imitate it. See also the sandbox section below.
Technical help
If you have any trouble with technical aspects, these help pages provided by wikia might help you out:
- Editing in general
- Adding links
- Common wikitext formatting
- Adding templates
- Using the page history
- Achievements and badges
- A glossary of common terms
- Other Help pages
You can also always ask one of the active administrators for help on their talk page, or create a thread in the forum.
Experimenting
If you are new to wikia, or even wikis in general, the default mode for editing articles is the "visual mode", which gives you a number of simple formatting options and displays tables, for instance, the way they look on finished pages. This mode is fine for beginners, but does have a number of limitations, and many more experienced users prefer its counterpart, the "source mode".
If you are feeling adventurous and/or want to improve your wiki editing skills, you can create your own sandbox. Sandboxes are a kind of personal testing ground apart from the main section of the wiki. For instance, if you see a piece of formatting on a page but can't replicate it by using the visual editor, you can take a look at the source of the page you like (click "Edit", and then "Source" in the upper right corner) and examine the code. You can copy that code to your sandbox and experiment with it until you're sure you know how it was done.
You can also use your sandbox to start articles that you know will remain in-progress for a while. Treat the sandbox like you would a regular page, work on it on your own time, and when you think it's long enough to warrant inclusion in the main section of the wiki, copy the code to a blank page and publish it.
To birth your own Sandbox, simply replace "NAME" in the field below with your actual username, and create that page:
<createbox> default=NAME/Sandbox preload= break=yes prefix=User: buttonlabel=Create your own sandbox page width=20 </createbox>
Two communal sandboxes which are open to anonymous, non-registered contributors are also available: a general one and a specialized one for references.