Help:Editing Guidelines

Policies

New pages policy

Pending an official Alexis pronunciation, all users are hereby discouraged from creating new pages if the title is not already created. At least on the main namespace. I understand templates might be more flexible (but see upper section on those). Statement pending of official revision Scarbrow (talk) 10:12, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Templates/ programming / arcana policy

Pending an official Alexis pronunciation, all users are hereby asked politely to not add unnecessarily complicated wikicode / wikitext / wiki markup to the pages, until and unless Alexis has given official permission. See on Template_talk:Bestiarychart for the (always impassioned) impressions of our host about this. Statement pending of official revision Scarbrow (talk) 10:12, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

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<-- I've moved these two sections, although new, to the top, with the intention of this being the start of a unified editing policy. Will move them back down if needed. This comment only for maintaining editors -->

Suggestion

Should we move this page to Help:Editing Guidelines? The Help namespace may be useful to keep these "non-wiki" instructional meta-pages collected. Namespaces in general could be very useful overall. --Shelby038 (talk) 00:20, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Templates

I've created a template for use for Bestiary stat blocks. I think templates are crucial for design as they allow quick changes in one location only, rather than needing to change every page where they are used. They are a big part of the wiki system. For example, we discussed the background color of the block. If we desired to change that color later, it can simply be done from the Template page. More than that, if later we wanted to format it more like the originals from the blog, that could be done without editing each creature's page. Check out the Alpaca page for an example of its use. I suggest this be done for any case where the same type of block is likely to be used: spells, for instance. --Shelby038 (talk) 00:20, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Sure. But I don't know how they work. I don't mind telling you, Shelby; my skill is in writing and design, NOT in html and programming; I'm learning all I can, but it isn't enough to just tell me something is good. I also need to know how it actually functions; what do I do with the template? Does cutting and pasting it to a new page ensure that a quick change affects all of them?

In general templates are used as:

{{templatename
| parameter = value
}}

Mediawiki finds "templatename," (in this example, Bestiarychart) and gives it the parameters and values that you've supplied. This ensures that all formatting remains the same, because Mediawiki only checks a single place for the formatting: the template source. What I will do (pending approval) is copy what I've shown on the Alpaca page, and modify it for each creature. I'd suggest to read Help:Templates but honestly it's quite dense; the "Creation" section is the only part written in half-way understandable English.

Herding cats

Hi all! Since I'm new, and I don't want to step on anybody's toes, I've gone ahead, been bold and tried a coordinating effort. Alexis, you can berate me for that. All the rest, you can berate me too! I'm just a newcomer. BUT I used to be a wiki admin. It just comes second nature. Hope nobody takes offense. Please remember, to keep the flow of conversation easy to read, to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~) Scarbrow (talk) 10:12, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

As a further suggestion, new suggestions (that aren't by themselves suggestions of new policies) should be added as sections below this one. Policies, however, should be listed at the top. Scarbrow (talk) 10:12, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Suggestions

CSS

Alexis, a suggestion. The current typeface on pages seems a little small. I think it may be tweaked about through MediaWiki:Common.css. Would you mind me trying it? Or else, I can just tweak the zoom on my browser. I don't know if this is an issue for anybody else. Comments? Scarbrow (talk) 10:12, 14 February 2020 (UTC)