CivWiki:Editing Guide

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This article is a beginner's guide to editing CivWiki. If you have questions or want additional help, feel free to join the CivWiki Discord.

See also CivWiki:Editing Projects for ongoing projects that you can help with!

Join the CivWiki Discord server!

FAQ

Thank you for editing CivWiki!

Q: How do I edit a page?

The excellent editing guide on Wikipedia explains how to edit and format a page. Wikipedia also has:

You must first create an account in order to edit CivWiki.

Q: How do I create a page?

Go to the url for the page you want to create and press "create".

Q: How do I upload an image?

Click the Upload file link in the left sidebar.

Q: How do I create a redirect?

Create a page with the following: #REDIRECT [[Mechanics and Plugins]]. This will create a redirect from that page to Mechanics and Plugins.

Q: How are templates used?

A template can standardize and save large amounts of time. To add a template to a page click 'Edit source' and paste in the template.

An example template is Template:Coord, used to affix a link to CCMap centered on specified coordinates. To center on x=0, z=0 with a viewing radius of 100, paste {{Coord|0|0|100}}. This will render as 0, 0

Q: Is there anywhere I can experiment with editing?

Yes! feel free to use CivWiki:Sandbox to experiment with editing, formatting, or getting familiar with MediaWiki (the software behind both Wikipedia and CivWiki).

Writing standards

Per CW:DEFER, articles on CivWiki follow Wikipedia's manual of style and are written from a neutral point of view. Nevertheless, CivWiki is not Wikipedia: in particular, content that is not written from a neutral point of view can remain as long as it is clearly stated to be opinion.

References

References should be used whenever possible. They can be anything from reddit posts, links to discord messages(screenshots of discord messages are also okay but a link is preferred), imgur albums/pictures, newspapers, or anything that has a name attached to the source which is easily verifiable.

Tips

Page checklist

In addition to content standards consider:

  • Relevant images to break up long walls of text
  • A short summary at top that can be understood without reading the full article
  • Page is not a stub (i.e. pages is too short to provide a relatively encyclopedic coverage of a subject
    • Searching Civ subreddits and discords for relevant content will often turn up useful information, references and images
  • "If an article's title is a formal or widely accepted name for the subject, display it in bold as early as possible in the first sentence" (see here)

Categories

To add a page to a category, add [[Category:category_name]] to the bottom of the page. For instance, to categorize a page as a civlization, add [[Category:Civilizations]] to the bottom of the page.

Dating information

Information that may quickly go out of date should be dated. (E.g. the population of X is 40 should be replaced with the population of X is 40, as of January 2020). If you find information that is not dated, affix the template:

{{when}}

Templates

Category:Civ templates has a number of useful civ-specific templates that may be useful.