User:Relyk/Newbie

I will keep sections brief and to the point. Read carefully, as there is a lot being said in very little words. Read each sentence like your life depended on it.

Wiki 101

• Make a user account. It's fast, simple, and allows other users to interact with you. Anonymity makes it very difficult to contribute your ideas to the wiki.
• Take time to read through some of the Guild Wars 2 Wiki:Practices and processes. You don't have to read it all, just get a general idea.
• Find a subject you're interested and delve into the talk pages, see what other people are saying.
• You cannot make wrong edits. There is a reason you made the edit you did.
• The history of an article shows every change made to the article. Once you make an edit, it will never ever go away.
• The wiki has guidelines, not policies. Guidelines are purposefully flexible and avoid wikilawyering. They should be viewed as tools for guiding discussion about edits and changes.

Editing

Hurray, you created a user account and are now part of the community. As a user, you now have a name, a user space, and a talk page. Other players can identify you by your name and interact with you on your talk page.

• Sign your comments with ~~~~ or click the Signature icon in the editing window.
• Use Show Preview to make iterative changes, this reduces the number of edits you make and shows all your changes at once.
• The "minor edit" is arbitrary, the wiki does not require you to use it in any way.

User

You have complete and sole control over your userspace. Other users are not allowed to edit your userspace unless you give them permission. You can put whatever you want in your userspace, just use common sense.

You will find that you run out of space in the main userspace. What you do is create subspaces in your userspace by using a /<name>.

1. I wanted a space in my userspace for my Warrior character named Relikh.
2. I search for "User:Relyk/Relikh", then click the "Create" tab to start the page.
3. I go to User:Relyk and create a link using User:Relyk/Relikh. This makes it easy to navigate to.

Sections

This is a subsection about "Sections" in the "Editing" section. You may note that level 3 heading styling and definition styling are similar.

Overview

Sections are how the pages are organized in a hierarchy and creates your table of contents (TOC). The wiki uses level 2 headings for the base level (== Level 2 heading ==). For dividing a section into subsections, use level 3 headings (=== Level 3 heading ===). For a majority of pages, subsections beyond this point tend to be wasteful as the sections will be short, interfere with formatting, and your table of contents be overly verbose. This is not a hard and fast rule as further subsections can be used to highlight important information or navigate to popular sections.

Definitions

Instead of using sections, consider using definition notation (;Definition) for identifying important pieces within a section. This avoids the overhead of sections with similar benefits. You can see the example of this in the current section, where I can organize the key points without using section labels. The reader can navigate to this section with the table of contents, but navigating to "Overview" or "Definitions" in this section would be excessive.

Uploading images

We have a page on Image formatting, skim through it for the basics. Making images for NPCs is tedious and not very fun, but you can speed up the process.

1. Use Paint or another editing program for cropping. I found FastStone Image Viewer to make the process much less of a hassle.
2. Make an NPC page using {{NPC infobox}} then click the red link to the image file upload.
3. Open up the editor and the directory to your Screens folder located at \Documents\Guild Wars 2\Screens. The game will tell you the file path when you take a screenshot.
4. Get on your asuran or female elementalist and talk to the NPC so he faces you. Use /sleep to get yourself out of the image.
5. Take a screenshot and the image will be saved to your screens folder.
6. Open the image on the editor and crop the NPC. Save the file as the name of the NPC.
7. Go back to your file upload tab and drag-n-drop the image into the upload field. You can also just browse to the image, but that takes longer.
8. Select "Screenshot" for the license and upload the image.

Moving pages

Users must be registered and be an autoconfirmed user to move pages and files. To move a page, click the move tab next to history on the page article. You will be asked for a new page. Give the page an appropriate name and give a summary for the move unless it's an obvious error. Once the page is moved, the original page will leave a redirect to that page. It will look like "#REDIRECT [[<Page name>]]" in code. You can manually create redirects, such as for common misspellings, for pages using the some code.

Prose

The wiki uses Wikipedia-style prose in articles. Articles are written with a summary and then sections dividing the contents of the article. Page titles and section names use sentence case rather than title case. We also don't use newspaper or blog style, so don't put every sentence in a new paragraph. Use bold or italics for their specific purposes, not for emphasis or use personal voice in the article.

Because the wiki is a community effort, we don't use first person like I or me. This is why you'll see me refer to myself as we whenever I'm am talking on behalf of the community. The prose should reflect the wiki as an entity addressing the reader. Ultimately, the wiki is a community project first and an encyclopedia second and we have a desire to create a dialogue with the reader rather than spout encyclopedic knowledge.

Anonymous users

Anonymous users are a vital resource of contributors for the wiki. It's always better to create a user account, but there is always a time investment required. Contributors may want to test the waters first before jumping in to contribute. Anonymous users can provide feedback, such as with our feedback button, and information dumps, which can later to be organized into an article.

Forums and fansites

Because many sites provide a knowledge base as a service, users can feel that the wiki is competing with other sites for contributors. Typically, this means that the wiki avoids linking to external sites for information. After all, the wiki shouldn't direct readers to other sites for information that itself would be providing. I personally dislike this attitude as communities and groups heavily overlap for games, especially in MMOs due to their design.

The wiki has the desire to work with other sites and groups to improve the wiki. We often rely on specific groups to discover information about the game and inform the larger community. A contributor may participate on the wiki, official forums, subreddit, and other sites like Dulfy. The point you shold keep in mind is that the wiki participates in a larger ecosystem and has obligations to both its own community and the larger game community for the game.