User:Doodleplex/Wiki Tips and Tricks

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Notice Note: Aloha quaggan icon.pngThis page is here to help other wiki editors, both new and experienced, with tips and tricks. If you can add helpful tips, feel free.

Useful pages[edit]

The following pages tend to be in not easy to find places(in my opinion) and they can be pretty helpful once found.

Tricks[edit]

  • NULL EDIT - A null edit is going to a page and saving it without making any changes. This forces the page to update itself, and can be used to update the page to show images that might have just been changed or to fix links that may have been altered. Super handy and helpful,1000% asura improved.
    • These are the tab at the top of every page: Page discussion leave article feedback edit history move watch refresh. This last one, which I made bold, also updates pages, and while not as effective as NULL Edits, it can sometimes be all that's needed to fix something. Good for refeshing the cache on a page so an image updates itself.
      • If an image still isn't updating, refresh the page itself. Sometimes it's your internet cache, not the pages.
  • When uploading an picture you don't have to select the licensing, you can add it in in the Summary box. For example you can copy-paste one of the the following things into the summary box when needed:

== Licensing ==
{{ArenaNet image|icon}}

== Licensing ==
{{ArenaNet image|screenshot}}

== Licensing ==
{{User image|username}}

The first one is for icons, the middle one is for pretty much nearly anything that isn't an icon, and the last one is particularly useful if you're uploading an image for yourself, as there is no drop down selection for user images.
  • Metadata sometimes shows up when people upload pictures. How to get around this? Thanks to User:Cloned: "It is really simple with a program called Irfanview. If you open an image with Irfanview first press Shift + J or select "Options -> Image Lossless Rotation" or select "Clear all APP Marker" and hit Enter (Or "Start"). After this two steps metadata is gone, no need to resave the image. Just close Irfanview or open another picture, whatever. If you resave the image you may add more Metadata back."
    • An alternative method is to upload the picture somewhere else on the internet, right click, and save the picture to your computer, delete it from wherever you uploaded and then upload it here, as the metadata is then removed from the picture.
  • NPC and area infoboxes(possibly all, but those are the two I know for sure) are 240 pixels wide. To have images on the left side of the page line up with the infobox's size, put |240 px at the end of the image code to have it be the same size.

Wiki Code[edit]

  • A lot of the back end wiki code/templates is made up of divs and code similar to #dpl and #ask, and is inside braces ie {{ }}.
    • If something has 3 braces, then it's a parameter the template is looking for.
  • Template code can be hidden by using <includeonly> at the start and </includeonly> at the end of the code right before <noinclude. The template will still work, it just doesn't show up at the top of the page.
  • If code on a userpage is causing things to break, simply put <pre> at the start and </pre> at the end of the code. <pre> and </pre> can also be used to display code on purpose, such as in the case of an example on a template page.
  • If a page needs to have an icon or a different name, but doesn't have an infobox, such as Black Lion Chest/historical, you can add it by adding in:
    • {{#set:Has canonical name=<name>}} for the page's name
    • {{#set:Has game icon=<icon>}} for an icon
    • {{#set:Has canonical name=<name>|Has game icon=<icon>}} for both

Tips[edit]

  • Quotes vs Dialogue vs Ambient dialogue vs Event dialogue: in short this can be really confusing, so here's a simple way to figure it out
    1. Dialogue is when you walk up to an NPC, hit the "talk" button(by default it's "F") and a brown box with text pops up with the NPC's picture on it. There is usually no audio that comes with it.
    2. Quotes only occurs when interacting with an NPC and appears overhead of the NPC in a cartoon-ish speech bubble. Quotes have audio, doesn't appear in your chat log, and will vanish after a few seconds. Quotes also includes interaction with foes, in regards to aggro and being defeated.
    3. Ambient dialogue is dialogue that occurs as NPCs hang out in certain areas and tends to repeat itself. Similar to quotes, it appears overhead of an NPC and has audio, but normally it does appear in your chat log(providing you have NPC dialogue turned on). This dialogue should be on the area page, and not the NPC page. (Why? Because...uh...Rytlock said so. Yep!)
      1. Note: There are some areas in the HoT maps and a few spots in Lion's Arch that have ambient dialogue that doesn't appear in your chat log. It's a pain to get, but the easiest way to know if it's a quote or ambient dialogue not showing up is to ask yourself,"Did I interact with the NPC?" and if the answer is "no", it's ambient dialogue.
    4. Event dialogue only occurs during events and will (usually) appear in your chat box. Unlike ambient dialogue, this dialogue doesn't repeat itself, it only occurs when the event occurs, and will appear in your chat log. On the event page the header is simply "== Dialogue =="
  • If you move a page, chances are you left a move remnant. If a redirect isn't needed to go to the new page, and for moving images this is a definite, please mark these with {{delete|move remnant|speedy}}. It makes life better. (Trust me) The following reasons are when it's okay to leave the redirect, instead of marking for deletion:
    • If it's commonly used word/phrase, such as "Orr" is a redirect page that goes to "Ruins of Orr" because while Ruins of Orr is the proper name, Orr is commonly used.
    • If it's a very close/common spelling mistake that is likely to happen, such as like "Abbadon" instead of "Abaddon", it's alright to just mark as a redirect instead of a delete.
However, don't mark a redirect for deletion until nothing links to that redirect page.
  • If you are archiving a page, don't just make a new page, and copy paste text, move the old page to the to the archive page name so that all of the edit history gets moved with it.
  • Interwiki links, when they are available, are put at the bottom of pages and show up on the left side of the browser under "Other languages". The three other wikis we can link to are:
The German Wiki of which we use [[de:German Wiki Pagename Here]] to link to it
The French Wiki of which we use [[fr:French Wiki Pagename Here]] to link to it
The Spanish Wiki of which we use [[es:Spanish Wiki Pagename Here]] to link to it
The trick to finding them(other than being bilingual) is to finding something else that does have a page with a wiki link that links to the page that doesn't and seeing if one of the other wiki's has a page for it. For example if Nebo Terrace didn't have any interwiki links, but the zone it's in, Gendarran Fields does, I'd use the interwiki on the side of the page to see if the pages on the other wiki's had a page for Nebo Terrance or not. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
  • If you're in game, you can also change your language settings in options to change the text to French, German or Spanish and it updates automatically, so you can use this to also get interwiki's.
  • When taking pictures of weapons or back items, female humans are used because:
  1. Norns normally have tattoos which distract from the object and can actually make it harder to see, as well as being very muscular, which causes clipping
  2. Asura scale things down so objects are smaller on them and details get lost
  3. Charr tails have this annoying habit of getting into things, and the charr slouch isn't very picture friendly.
  4. Females cause less clipping than males, less muscle, so it's just easier to see objects. Human males can be used, but females are preferred for that reason.
What about sylvari? Their skin textures tend to be allll over the place, and using just one race makes pictures more uniform so people focus more on the object and less on the model, so using sylvari, while not preferred, is okay. (Scarlet Briar need not apply. Stay dead please. =<).

General FYI[edit]

  • Don't use "?", "+" or "#" in page titles, as it breaks stuff and is very scary. If you see something that has one of these, exclude it and put the following code at the top of the page: {{Correct title|Something with a ?|symbol=?}} or {{Correct title|Something with a #|symbol=#}}
  • Also, please don't use smart quotes. Something that has a smart quote near it will not turn up in a wiki search. (I found this out trying to find where "Eela" came from. Turns out they were in some ambient dialogue as "Eela's" and the smart quote disabled it from showing up in a wiki search)
  • Yes some events have periods at the end of their name. We don't include the period at the end, it makes things easier to read without it, so don't put it in if creating an event page.
    • Exclamation points are okay to include.
  • Other than spam bot posts/vandalism, normally you should never ever(ever) remove comments from talk pages. You can however remove things that are sensitive, such as a person's email address/password/etc.
  • If somebody creates a page for their guild and it's "Guild Name" instead of "User:Guildname", move it to their user page. Unlike the GW1 wiki, we don't have pages for guilds on the mainspace, but having guild pages in user space/pages is totally okay! =)

External guides[edit]

These were posted on my talk page. They are helpful if you want to learn how to fix some of backend code

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