Board Thread:Tips / Guides/@comment-28735375-20161031021439

I myself am still pretty new here and I know although the desire is there to add to the Wikia, there is a bit of a learning curve. I plan to document what I have learned here to make it is easy as possible for other new contributors. Feel free to add anything helpful you may have. While some CSS knowledge would be helpful, I don't believe it's totally necessary. The only thing you really need to do is be patient and look at the code that's already there and see where the displayed info fits in.

ON TEMPLATES

Templates are the key to keeping everything in the Wikia looking good and also looking uniform. There are templates for everything from the whole site to the little icon for a QMP. Most of the smaller ones are just a word inside brackets [ ] or braces { }. One simple trick I learned very quickly is when you are editing an entry all you need to do to turn a word into a link is put it inside two sets of brackets, so London would be displayed in the entry simply as London, but would be a link to the London page in the Wikia. If no page exists for the link you created it will ask anyone who clicks on it to create one. A list of many of the Templates can be found here:

http://unchartedwaters.wikia.com/wiki/Official_Uncharted_Waters_Wiki:Templates

EDITING

I have found this to be the easiest action to jump into. My adventure here on the Wikia started as I was building my company Colony and came across the Company Colony Guide here. I found it to have much information other sites were lacking, but lacking some info also. It was easy to add to since the Template was already in place for the tables. I could just fill in the blanks so to speak, and also corrected some of what appeared to be translation errors most likely from copying the Asian wikis. I was also able to add new tables, like the Dedicated Facilities table, simply by copying a table that was already there and altering it to suit my purpose. I also made all the names in the Trade Goods List into links to their respective pages. So if you find pages that could use a little tweaking in any of these respects, that is a good place to get your feet wet. A bit deeper into the editing game is finding pages that don't match the newest templates of their entry type or are incomplete in a more serious way. By newest templates I mean the nicer, newer colored boxes the info is presented in. An example of this would be a quest entry that is not contained in one of the light blue boxes that look very reminiscent of the quest information screen in game. Another example would be a trade good page that has the Info on the trade good itself, perhaps even in the most current table style, but is missing the "Related Books" section which should be there as well. Once you are a little familiar with the site you will notice what looks off (old style or complete lack of templates, missing related info) For these types of situations you could go to the link posted above and copy the blank template you need and fill it in... But I have found it helpful to go to a similar page that is done correctly and enter edit mode, copy the table(s) I need, cancel out of that edit, and proceed to paste the required table(s) into the page I'm working on. Of course it will be full of the wrong information, but you have your template framework and just need to edit the information contained therein. Honestly I learned this way by not finding the templates page I mentioned earlier until recently :P I don't know if this method is exactly "recommended" by the admins, but if you are not yet familiar with the system, doing this is a good way to see examples of how and where the information gets entered in, and also some of the variables you will encounter. Another option would be just to poke around in edit mode on some correctly done entries that you wish to emulate to familiarize yourself, and then use a "blank" template from the like above to make your page. Either way, just make sure to cancel out of the correctly done page without buggering it up!!!

CREATING A NEW PAGE

Once you have done some poking around and editing and have familiarized yourself with the way things work, you are ready to start creating new entries and really bringing this site up to speed. Ideally by now you know the templates you need for the entry type you are creating and can just grab them from the Official Uncharted Waters Wiki:Templates pages. But here you must also make sure to link to your new page from corresponding pages so people can find it. If it is for a quest you want to make sure you edit in an entry for it on the correct list of quests which then links to your quests info page. Books and recipes need to be linked to all the pages for all the trade goods contained in the recipe, and the crafting skill used and so on. If you have been around this site and Ivyro, you know what people are looking for... If there is any relevant word on a page I'm looking at, I want to be able to click on it! If it's a skill, trade good, an item, an FS part, a city, or an NPC it should be a link to take me to more info.

I will hopefully add more helpful tips to this post for new contributors as time goes on. I know there is probably a lot more I know that I didn't cover and even more that I have yet to learn myself. But hopefully for now this should help point some people in the right direction with getting started. And with the growing buzz on the OGP forums over Ivyro's stagnation, our great need for a new well maintained central database, and admin Jazzmin's recent activity, hopefully more and more will begin to direct their concerns and efforts here. Thanks to all for reading 