Help:Best Practices: Articles

Articles
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Welcome to your first article! "Article" means "a wiki page with information on it." Not all pages on your wiki will hold information, and other types of pages include:

• Templates (they start with Template:)
• Files (starting with File: and including one uploaded image, sound recording, or other file type per page)
• Categories (starting with Category: and consisting of a list of similar pages that you or another editor has "categorized" together

This guide will go over the sections of an article and explain how to create each one. We'll take a look at a page on Wikipedia:

It's okay if you don't understand anything on this page; we're just going to look at the layout (so I wanted a very short page).

1. Title - The top of the page will automatically display the page's title, which is the same as its location in the URL bar. Every page on the wiki starts with the same path (for example, https://support.wiki.gg/wiki/), and then the page title comes after that. For example, this page's title is Help:Best Practices/Articles. To create a page with the title you want (let's say Awesome turtles), there are a few options:
   • Write [[Awesome turtles]] somewhere on the wiki and then click it (this is great if you've mentioned the page somewhere already)
   • Search for Awesome turtles in the wiki search bar (NOT on Google) and then click where it says Create the page "Awesome turtles" on this wiki!
   • Visit your wiki and then edit the URL bar directly to visit https://support.wiki.gg/wiki/Awesome_turtles (replacing support with your wiki's name). You can type spaces into your URL bar and they'll get corrected to underscores.

   If you want the title of your page to be different from the URL for some reason, you can use the extension Display Title. This is not recommended except in very specific circumstances.

2. The Sidebar is actually a static element that's the same on every wiki page. You can customize it at MediaWiki:Sidebar (with admin permissions), but please follow the Customization Policy.
3. The main content of the article is where most of your page's content should go. Unlike Wikipedia, most game wikis tend to have a lot of tables, images, bulleted and/or numbered lists, quotes, and other visual elements, with minimal text. Here are some resources you may want to use:
   • Help:Tables on mediawiki.org
   • Help:Templates on mediawiki.org
   • Template:Quote, an example template for displaying game quotes in a pretty way
   • A markup cheetsheat on mediawiki.org. MediaWiki markup is similar in philosophy to Markdown, but the syntax is somewhat different.
   • More formatting help on mediawiki.org
4. Depending on what type of article you're writing, you may or may not want to include a References section. See the Cite extension docs on mediawiki.org for documentation on how to use references.
5. Categories - Add categories to your page by typing [[Category:Enemies]]. If you want to link to a category, you can type [[:Category:Enemies]]
6. Infobox - an infobox isn't required, but most pages will have an infobox. See Extension:PortableInfobox for some documentation about how to make an infobox.