How-To-Wiki

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Welcome to the Wiki Etiquette and How To Guide!

Creating A Page

1. Log into the site as the name you'd like to create the page under. Pages are created under character or "alt" names rather than real or screen names.
2. At the top of the page, click the "wikipages" heading. This will take you to a screen with several input fields on it.
3. Fill in the title you wish the page to have. All pages must have a title. Page titles can have letters, numbers, and dashes only as special characters. Apostrophes, quotation marks, etc. do not work.
4. Scroll down to the "content" box. and begin to fill in what you'd like the page to say.
5. Click the Save button at the bottom of the page to save your new page.
6. If the save button dims, your page has been successfully saved. You should also get some popup boxes on the right side of your screen that tell you your page was saved. If something went wrong, you will get a red popup box with an error. Once your page is saved, you must use the site navigation at the top of the page to continue.

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Editing A Page

1. Log into the site as the name you'd like to edit the page as.
2. Navigate to the page you'd like to edit (most often by using the search feature of the wiki)
3. Click the light blue "edit" button above the page's current content.
4. Change or add the content that you need to.
5. In the Summary box, add the date (and time, if you'd like) and list the changes you've made. Changes can be functional, like "corrected spelling" or "added link", or they can be cosmetic, "Added headings" or "changed font". You can also just simply expand the content, or correct the content.
6. Click the Save button at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

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Formatting

We use a formatting language called Mediawiki.

Headings

Heading sizes are dictated by the number of equals signs (=) around them.
One equals sign is a page title-sized heading.
Two equals signs are usually for chapter or sub-page headings.
Three equals signs are were we really start to see functional page divisions. The Formatting heading at the top of this section uses three equals signs.
Equals signs heading sizes continue down to six. On the Karchan wiki, by level five you're out of the trademark curly font and into a sanserif font.

Magic Words

Pages that use four or more headings automatically generate a table of contents at the top of the page. The code NOTOC surrounded by two underscores on each side will prevent one from generating.

If you wish your page to still have a table of contents, but don't like it at the top of the page, the magic word TOC surrounded by two underscores on each side will place the table of contents at that point on the page.

There are more magic words that work on our wiki, so try some out if you're looking for a particular effect!

Text Effects

Apostrophes ( ' ) determine the effect that your wiki text has.
Two apostrophes around a word or phrase will make it italic.
Three apostrophes around a word or phrase will make it bold.
Note:These effects cannot be shortcut by using quotations. They must be used with apostrophes.

Lists

Lists can be either bullet points or numbers. Bullet point lists use the asterisk ( * ) to put varieties of dots in front of your text. The number of asterisks you place before your text determines the indentation level and dot appearance of your bullet points.

• One asterisk gives you a standard left-aligned bullet point.
  • Two asterisks gives you a typical list-level indent.
    • Three asterisks turns into a square.
      • Four asterisks continues to indent, but does not evolve the bullet point any more.
        • Five asterisks is possible, as are more.

• • • Skipping levels in asterisks can give you a pretty neat effect, like this, but shouldn't be relied on to indent text.

Numbered lists are accomplished with the pound or "number" sign ( # ):

1. One pound sign at the begging of each line will give you a straight-forward, numbered list.
2. One.
3. One.
   1. Two pound signs start something more akin to an outline.
   2. Two.
   3. Two.
      1. Three.

Just like above with the bullet lists, the levels seem unending, and you can jump straight to any level with somewhat comedic effect:

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. You'll always be number one in my heart.

Another type of list is a definition list.

A semicolon at the beginning of a line denotes it as a term and automatically makes the entire line bold.

A colon at the beginning of a line denotes the definition, and forces a new line.

A term can have multiple definitions on multiple different lines.

Each new line must start with a colon.

Line breaks can also be accomplished by using just a colon, no semi-colon necessary!

HTML

Many HTML tags still work and function as normal on the wiki, including but not limited to:
Strikethrough
Underline
Code

Blockquote works, though I feel that this same effect is accomplished with the colon.

Some style tags work, but those are mostly things that you'll have to experiment with.

The break tag (br surrounded by <) does work, though it's much more simple to use the colon.

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Wiki Functions

Special syntax is needed in order to make the most out of how the wiki functions. Here are some of the more useful or important things to know.

Linking

There are multiple ways to link things in an article. For the sake of examples, spaces have been inserted into the code lines. When you actually use these on your page, you'll want to eliminate the spaces between the double brackets, for example.

1. Double brackets [ [ ] ] around any word or group of words automatically turns it into a clickable link. If a page using that word or group of words as a title exists, then it creates a link to that page.
   1. Everything is case-sensitive. If you write the words in brackets as A Walk, and the page name is A walk, then it will not link correctly.
   2. The bracketed content turns into a link, no matter what. It will just lead to an error that says, "This wiki page does not exist." The only way to know if you did it correctly is to click the link.
   3. Want to link to a page but don't want the page's title where the link is? Add a pipe ( | ), the character above the forward slash, to the end of the page title and fill in afterward what you want it to say. So, for example, our page titled A walk looks like [ [A walk|here] ], where "here" is the text used to replace the page name.
2. If you want to link to an external page of the wiki (even if it's on the Karchan website) you need to use the HTML tag a href = url.
3. Want to link to a specific section of your page? Headings are also anchor points, so you can link to a heading anywhere in a page from anywhere else on that page. You mark the anchor point to link to by simply putting a hashtag (number sign, pound sign) before the heading name. For example the code [ [ # Creating_A_Page ] ] looks like this, and if you click it will take you back up to that heading on this page.
   1. Note the underscores instead of spaces in the heading name. In order for the HTML translator to be happy, we have to replace spaces with underscores.

Tagging

Tagging is relatively new to the Karchan wiki, and it can be somewhat confusing because it's an invisible operator. Tagging works much the same as linking does, except tagging aids the searchable database of pages and makes returning specific search terms more reliable. I prefer to use tags at the end of a page, below the related links, though you can use them anywhere within the page. For our particular wiki version, tagging always starts with Category, for example [ [Category:PCs] ].

Every page that contains the PCs tag will show up in search results when you search for "Category:PCs". Ideally, that would mean that every character that has a page on the wiki would return in that search. You can even tree those searches further and create character-specific tags, so that characters that are mentioned but not participating in plots, arcs, events, and RPs return as results when that character is searched for. As an example, [ [ Category:PCs:Zaria] ] would return everything that mentions Zaria's name in the body of the article, but not necessarily the listed or linked characters and organizations in the article.

See the Index of Tags for commonly used and growing tags to use on your pages, like class, race, faction and alignment.

Tables

If you value your sanity, don't.

Last modified on January 7, 2025, 02:08:07