Help:Editing

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	Currently undergoing revision with NeoDex specific rules included

General

To edit a page, click on the "Edit" link at one of its edges.

After adding to or changing the wikitext it is useful to press "Show Preview", which produces the corresponding webpage in your browser but does not make it publicly available yet (not until you press "Save"). Errors in formatting, links, tables, etc., are often much easier to discover from the rendered page than from the raw wikitext.

If you are not satisfied you can make more changes and preview the page as many times as necessary. When finished, write a short edit summary in the small text field below the edit-box and press "Save". Depending on your system, pressing the "Enter" key while the edit box is not active (i.e., there is no typing cursor in it) may have the same effect as pressing "Save".

Dummy edit

If the wikitext is not changed while saving no edit will be recorded and the edit summary is discarded.

A dummy edit is a change in wikitext that has no effect on the rendered page. This allows an edit summary, and is useful for correcting a previous edit summary, or an accidental marking of a previous edit as "minor" (see below). Also it is sometimes needed to refresh the cache of some item in the database.

Editing with Style

The NeoDex is a Neopets Encyclopaedia, so it is essential that at all times the articles are easy to read, easy to edit, are consistent, and retain an encyclopaedic voice. There are no rigid rules here - after all, concise, unbiased writing is the most important part of the encyclopaedia - but there are some assumptions, conventions and considerations involved in writing NeoDex articles

This article is about these conventions. For anything that is not covered here, please refer to the Wikipedia Manual of Style.

This section concerns itself with the writing styles of an article (rather than formatting issues). As far as this is concerned, it is actually very hard to do any "wrong". It is, however, harder to be truly stylish.

Varying forms of English

In the English-speaking world, there are several acceptable forms of English. As Neopets.com was founded in Britain, spellings and writing traditions on the official site are kept as British despite the fact that the Head Office was moved to California. Similarly, to maintain consistency with the official site, articles written for the NeoDex should use the British-English forms of the words.

If, as is the case on occasion, a form of a word has been used on the official Neopets.com site to describe something that is not the British form, then this form should be used instead.

The blanket rule used for determining English variations is to avoid reversion warring.

Dates

As a Neopian Calendar exists and is used on Neopets.com in addition to the Gregorian calendar, there is some dispute as to which calendar to use. For simplicity, the Gregorian calendar should be used, as when researching extremely old portions of the Neopets.com site, this is the calendar used in the New Features, and is the most logical calendar to use when referring to sites involving Neopets outside of Neopets.com.

There are also some dispute over how to write dates out in the NeoDex. The more short hand notation, dd/mm/yyyy should not me used: instead, dates should be written out fully, e.g. 31st May 2006. The year does not need to be included if it has already been mentioned shortly before as the previous date in the article. The day here precludes the month to retain the British look.

Use of Capital Letters

Initial capital letters should be used for proper nouns and words at the beginning of sentences but not as a means of emphasis.

Due to technical constraints, all article titles on the NeoDex must begin with a capital letter. When using a wikilink in the middle of a sentence, it may not be appropriate to use a capital letter. This can be overcome in several ways, either by setting up a redirect on the page without an initial capital letter and wikilinking to that article, or by putting the proper name of the article in the wikilink, followed by a vertical bar, followed by the text to be displayed, i.e.

[[Proper article name|name without capitalisation]]

This technique can also be used to wikilink to a page without using its actual name.

Formating

This section concerns itself with the use (and application) of formating techniques within the NeoDex.

Headings

Headings divided a topic up into several sections. By using headings one forces oneself to be more creative and thus output more than just a few words or a few brief sentences (which while this may be good it is not yet as extensive as an encyclopaedia should be). There may be little to put under certain headings when one writes an article for the first time, but it will make it easy for other authors and oneself to return and continue each section.

A good article should be structured with the following sections, which should be headed appropriately to the article's subject matter:

• A brief introduction (usual without a heading) that briefly, yet concisely, gives, among other things where appropriate:
  • The definition of the article's subject (if applicable).
  • Dates for when the event in the article commenced to its end (if applicable).
  • The use of the article's subject (if applicable).
• Details of the topic.
• Other Thoughts on the topic.

Other common headings include:

• History
• Trivia
• External Links

Wikilinks

Wikilinks are links to other articles within the NeoDex. Any word or phrase that relates to Neopets in your article should be wikilinked, for if there is not already an article on that topic someone may very likely write one. Words such as Krawk or Maraqua should be obvious for wikilinking, but other Neopets concepts like User lookups should also be wikilinked.

Dead links, displayed in red on a page, are not a bad thing: it gives opportunity for entirely new articles to be created. In the event that the article you are trying to link to does exist, but under a different name, the page the wikilink heads to should redirect to it.

Ideally, the first occurance of a word in the article should be the one to be wikilinked. It is not recommended to link to a specific article more than once per article, and a wikilink should not appear in a heading. If necessary, the first sentence under a heading should be written to contain the word or phrase in the heading that should be wikilinked, and this occurance of the word used as the link.

Use of Emphasis

Here there are a few brief descriptions of some of the uses of italics and bold. It is very much a matter of the author's discretion in many cases, this is not a definitive list of situations where these would be appropriate.

Italics

Italics should be used mainly of emphasis of certain words, although should be used sparingly. They can also be used to indicate when a word or letter is serving as a word or letter, rather than its meaning, e.g. "NeoHome is an amalgamation of the words Neopets and home.

If something would usually be put in inverted commas (NB: not quotation marks), italics will usually be used instead.

Bold

Bold type is primarily used for repeating the articles title within the article. One should not put bold tags in headings, as the font weight of a heading is increased already.

Use of Pictures

Whenever possible, a picture of the article's topic should be included at the top section of a page, right aligned. With multiple pictures, they can either be staged across the page right and left, or kept all right aligned.

Minor edit

When editing a page, a logged in user has the option of flagging the edit as a "minor edit". When to use this is somewhat a matter of personal preference. The rule of thumb is that an edit of a page that is spelling corrections, formatting, and minor rearranging of text should be flagged as a "minor edit". A major edit is basically something that makes the entry worth relooking at for somebody who wants to watch the article rather closely, so any "real" change, even if it is a single word. This feature is important, because users can choose to hide minor edits in their view of the recent changes to keep the volume of edits down to a manageable level.

The reason for not allowing a user who is not logged in to mark an edit as minor is that vandalism could then be marked as a minor edit, in which case it would stay unnoticed longer. This limitation is another reason to log in.

Each wiki-community has different ideas about when an edit is no longer minor, but a general rule of thumb should be a quick spelling/mark-up tweak that does not effect the content of the article should be marked as minor.

Wikifying an article, that is, making it more encyclopaedic in voice and matching the style of the rest of the Neodex is usually marked as minor.

Spam

Inevitably, due to the nature of a Wiki and how easy it is to edit it, spam will undoubtedly crop up. In cases where it does, reversion is necessary. This involves removing the spam and replacing any valid text that may have been deleted (this can all be checked in the history of a page).

Table of contents (TOC)

For each page with more than three headings, a table of contents (TOC) is automatically generated from the section headings, unless:

• (for a user) preferences are set to turn it off
• (for an article) in the edit box the code __NOTOC__ is added

With __FORCETOC__ or __TOC__ in the wikitext a TOC is added even if the page has less than four headings. The TOC is put before the first section header, or in the case of __TOC__, at the position of this code. Thus there may be some introductory text before it, known as the "lead". Although usually a header after the TOC is preferable, __TOC__ can be used to avoid being forced to insert a meaningless header just to position the TOC correctly, i.e., not too low. Preferences can be set to number the sections automatically.

In a page calling a template with sections, the sections in the template are numbered according to their position in the rendered page, e.g. if the template tag is in the third section, then the first section of the template is numbered four. Any text in the template before its first section shows up as part of the section with the template tag, and any text after the tag before a new header shows up as part of the last section of the template. This may be done deliberately, but can usually better be avoided (see also below).

Templates

Some part of a page may correspond in the edit box to just a reference to another page, in the form {{name}}, referring to the page "Template:name" (or if the name starts with a namespace prefix, it refers to the page with that name; if it starts with a colon it refers to the page in the main namespace with that name without the colon). This is called a template. For changing that part of the page, edit that other page. Sometimes a separate edit link is provided for this purpose. Note that the change also affects other pages which use the same template. For all of the NeoDex's major templates, see NeoDex:Templates.

Built in templates

The following are templates built into the wiki engine of the NeoDex, and cannot be editted.

• {{CURRENTDAYNAME}} - Shows the current name day (Monday, Tuesday, etc.)
• {{CURRENTDAY}} - Shows the current day of the month
• {{CURRENTMONTHNAMEGEN}} - Shows the current month
• {{CURRENTYEAR}} - Shows the current year
• {{CURRENTTIME}} - Shows the current time
• {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} - Shows the current number of articles in the NeoDex

Page protection

In a few cases the link labeled "Edit" is replaced by the text "View Source". This article is protected and can only be edited by means of an Administrator. Should you find something which is not on the article, bring it up on the articles discussion board.

Redirecting articles

Sometimes data in an article or the whole article itself needs to be redirected or moved to a page with a synonomous name, e.g. "Faerie Quests" redirects to Faerie Quest, "Snow Faerie" to "Taelia". To make a redirect, clear the article and only place this coding...

#REDIRECT[[(Name of article being redirected to)]]

Mark Up

These is some basic wiki coding editors can use.

• '''Bold text'''
• ''Italic text''
• [[Link title]]
  • [[Link title|Link Text]]
• Headings - by carefull use of heading levels a page content list is built for you.
  • = Headline text = - 1st level
  • == Headline text == - 2nd level
  • === Headline text === - etc
  • ==== Headline text ====
  • ===== Headline text =====
• <nowiki>ignore wiki format</nowiki>
• [[Category:Some Fancy Category]] - Add a Category
• ---- - Dividing line
• --~~~~ - signiture
• * Bullet point
  • ** Second level
    • *** 3rd Level
• # add this to have numbered lists instead.

External links

• Wikipedia - How to edit a page
• Wikipedia - Manual of Style
• Wikipedia Help - Editing