AchaeaWiki:Contributing Guidelines

All players who have logged over 300 hours on a character may contribute to Achaea Wiki. Here are a few general things to keep in mind, as well as a guide to editing and creating articles.

• Always adhere to the wiki's policies.
• If you are totally unfamiliar with wikis, check out http://en.wikipedia.org
• What's a wiki anyway? Wiki?
• Don't know where to start contributing?
  • Special:Wantedpages lists pages that still need to be written.
  • Special:Lonelypages lists pages that should probably be linked from another page but aren't yet.
  • Special:Uncategorizedpages lists pages that need to be categorized (and Special:Categories lists potential categories for them).

Articles entered into the Achaea Wiki archives need to have a certain structure and format in order to ensure readability and consistency throughout. Plus, there are just certain ways of formatting the information such that it flows well within the online system used to present it. Furthermore, please ensure that you adhere to our policies at all times.

Articles

Articles are generally snippets of information on a specific topic. They may contain sections and subsections if it's a particularly long topic, but it must not be overly broad and contain lots of factual information. Be objective in all things when authoring a bit of lore. This is a compendium of all the facts related to Achaea, so make sure you remain objective in tone and phrasing.

The articles in the "Help:" namespace are all imported directly from Achaea's help system. They are here for reference purposes, but are not meant to be the be-all and end-all of information about the subjects they touch upon. If you want to create, for example, an [Ashtan] page that lists more information about Ashtan than in [Help:Ashtan], go ahead. An Achaean Lore [Ashtan] page might list previous Overseers, Archons, and Divine Patrons of Ashtan, delve deeper into its history, link to a map, discuss its restaurants and shops, et cetera, information [Help:Ashtan] would not have.

Article Naming

Articles are referenced by their names, so choosing an appropriate one is very key. Most information can be referred to by its proper name, such as "Vampires" or "Azdun". Sometimes, it's helpful to further qualify a name if it's possibly ambiguous we do this by appending a parenthetical to the end. For example: "Twilight (time of day)" could differentiate between "Twilight" (referring to the God).

If an article's title has more than one word, DO use spaces. "Great Mhunna" not "GreatMhunna".

Namespaces

When choosing a name, do not include a colon (':') in the name. This is reserved for 'namespaces' a feature of the wiki system and used only in very special circumstances. Do not change pages that already have a namespace on them. For example, "Help:" and "AchaeaWiki:" should not be removed or changed to a different namespace. At this time, please do not change any pages in the "Help:" namespace.

Categories

All (or almost all) articles should contain at least one category. Categories are added at the end of an article and usually refer to a group or classification for that article. For instance, the page "Zsarachnor" is in the "Vampires" category. There are in fact sub-categories as well (clicking on Category:Vampires will bring you to that page, which lists articles in that category -- but you can see that even that page is in the "Creatures" category).

Note: If an article belongs in a sub-category, there is no need to include it in the more generic category. For instance, "Uncharted Areas" is a sub-category of "Areas", so any article referring to an uncharted place need only include the specific category ("Uncharted Areas") and not the more generic one ("Areas").

Content

When writing the actual article body, please keep the following in mind:

• Refer to factual items using the wiki link markup (e.g. [[foo]]), but only in the first reference (or if it's not obvious). No need to make every word in the body a link.
• Always remember to add a category to the article.
• Do not include OOC comments in the body of the page. If you need to share information or comments about an article, use the "Talk"/"Discussion" tab for that page.
• Use UK English to be consistent with in-game text - honour instead of honor, colour instead of color, et cetera.
• When creating links, make sure you check the plurality of any existing topics. For instance, do not create an "Ur'Vampires" link if there's already an "Ur'Vampire" page. You can specify a link to the singular while maintaining a plural form in context using proper wiki markup.

Standardised Formatting

We are using the Wikipedia Manual of Style for basic formatting guidelines. See also our unique Formatting Page and the "Achaea-specific considerations" section below.

Spelling

You should always use UK English on this wiki (as in Achaea itself)! Please feel free to edit any posts that do not conform to UK English spellings. There is a post on the forums with help on using UK English and not other types.

Privileged Information

• The same rules go here as for the Forums. Please do not share quests, skills information, or anything that should reasonably stay private (i.e., House news posts, Order esoterica, et cetera).
• Information that is related to quests should only be included when they are instrumental in describing an area or denizen, and of course, we should never include any information that you could not attain without actually completing part of a quest. For example, saying that Kasmarkin is a sunken city in the Mannaseh that can be raised is one thing; giving explicit instructions as to how to raise the city is another.
• If information related to a quest must be included, be as vague as possible.

Achaea-specific considerations

• In pages about Areas, individual places within the area should be bolded (unless they are linked).
• Other areas and all denizens should be linked, not bolded or italicised.
• Adventurers are not usually linked (see Adventurers of Note).
• Some categories have special meaning. For instance, Areas, Villages, City-states, and Uncharted Areas all classify different types of places (with special in-game meanings). Make sure you are using the correct category.
• Locations should link via the entire proper name. For instance "[[Urubamba River]]" not "[[Urubamba]] River".

Editing

When you edit an existing page, please be considerate and summarise what you did in the Summary field.

New Pages

New pages can be created in wiki-fashion by creating a link in an existing page/article or by simply trying to access that page in your browser directly. For example: "http://wiki.achaea.com/My new article" should (in most modern browsers) take you to the correct place and you may edit from there. Take care, however when creating these 'orphaned' pages. Because they can be hard to find if an existing page does not link to them. And chances are, if the topic was important enough to have an article, it is mentioned in some related article(s).

Also, when creating new pages, feel free to go back to older, related pages and create any links that may seem appropriate.

Adventurers of Note

See AchaeaWiki:Adventurers for more information on when pages should and should not be created.