Help:Onboarding

Onboarding
Next	Migration or New Wiki

Onboarding is a special experience that wiki.gg offers to help users migrate or create new wikis.

Summary

Onboarding allows you, the user, to stylize your wiki to your own liking. Customize it with special themes and colors to make it suit your topic. While in onboarding, you are allowed to invite fellow editors to the onboarding server so that they can help out the wiki before it finally gets publicly announced.

This onboarding experience is a one-on-one experience with staff members to help you build your wiki to your standards while also keeping in mind our Customization Policy. Do note, each wiki is put in a queue, and it could take several days or weeks depending on the number of applications that were sent/accepted before you submitted your onboarding application. So, please have patience during this time period.

Purpose

The purpose of onboarding is supposed to give your community a good first impression when your wiki goes public. Having a wiki style and main page to display your wiki contents should always come first. Adding in pages and updating pages can always come after you release the wiki to the public.

You are free to edit the wiki as you wish, create pages, upload files, create templates, install any gadgets, and request any extensions that the wiki needs. Take advantage of our onboarding Wiki Curators in your experience so we can style your wiki if you aren't familiar with .css/.js.

In short; verify the style is to your liking, verify main page is to your liking, verify it operates on mobile correctly, release the wiki to public, then add content.

Start

See Help:Getting Started to get started.

We will check in weekly to see if you need any help, but you can also ask us at any time for help, whether it's a user rights issue or you need an extension installed or a coding question answered.

Process

1. Join the Onboarding Discord
2. Invite other admins and editors to help out.
   1. Give them the Discord invite link that you used to join the server.
3. See Help:Getting Started for instructions to log in for the first time. If you're in charge of the wiki, request administrator permissions for yourself and anyone else who will need them (for editing CSS, JS, the sidebar, creating Cargo tables, etc.)
4. Create articles, templates, and other information to build out the wiki.
5. Style the wiki:
   • If you are building your own theme, edit MediaWiki:Common.css to style your wiki.
   • Otherwise, ask for help with your theme and then wait for wiki.gg staff to build a theme for you (at no cost to you). If you need us to design the theme, please give us as much information as possible - a mock-up would be great; otherwise, tell us colors you'd like us to use and upload some assets from the game.
6. Ready to go? Make sure you've completed the checklist and then ask for your wiki to be made public in your Onboarding channel.

Editing

• Updating infoboxes with new information, maybe organizing it better(?)
• Updating articles to make it more readable.
• Head to Special:SpecialPages on your wiki. From there, you can get links to (and then fix any problems with):
  • Special:DoubleRedirects
  • Special:BrokenRedirects
  • Special:UncategorizedFiles (you may also want to check Special:UncategorizedPages, Special:UncategorizedTemplates, and the extremely meta Special:UncategorizedCategories, but some wikis don't care about categorizing everything)
  • From Special:UnusedTemplates, Special:UnusedFiles, and Special:UnusedCategories, delete anything you don't need anymore
  • From Special:WantedCategories, Special:WantedFiles, and Special:WantedTemplates, create everything that's needed or fix/remove the call to something that really shouldn't be there. If you are creating a "maintenance" category, for example some of the DPL ones, you can write __HIDDENCAT__ on the category page so that the category populates but you don't see it linked from any pages. It is recommended against adding __HIDDENCAT__ to Category:Pages with script errors or other error categories, because you should see very visibly when a page has broken content, but it's up to you.
  • Check out Special:WantedPages and see if there's any you feel you need to create. It's ok to have some "redlinks" (links to nonexistent pages) though.

Checklist

1. (Optional) Did you check to see that all your templates, navigation boxes, and infoboxes are stylized? How do they look, detailed and organized?
2. (Optional) Try and adapt dark mode for users, check the documentation here. An easy toggle between light/dark mode for users who don't like bright lights.
3. (Optional) Did you check to see if your wiki works on different platforms, i.e., mobile devices?
4. (Required) Did you upload a wiki logo? Check File:Site-logo.png to see if you did. The default logo area is 160x160px; logos are needed for the wikis list.
5. (Required) Did you upload a site favicon? Check File:Site-favicon.ico to see if you did. Favicons are needed for the site's browser tab, bookmarks, and desktop shortcuts.
6. (Required) Make sure recentchanges-url|recentchanges and TOOLBOX are in your sidebar per the Customization Policy (they're there by default).