Difference between revisions of "PSU Cyril Wiki:New user guide"

Revision as of 15:31, 3 April 2008

This guide is designed to assist newly registered users who wish to contribute to and help improve PSUPedia. While this may not be inclusive of everything, hopefully it'll be a good start.

All you need to contribute are a registered account, good English grammar and spelling, and accurate knowledge of the game. Familiarity with HTML (specifically tables) is helpful, but not necessary.

First steps

After registering, it helps to familiarize yourself first of all with Wiki syntax. A decent beginners guide is located here, courtesy of Wikimedia. You can practice some of what you'll learn in our sandbox, which is a special page designed for testing out wiki code. Don't worry about messing up anything that's already there.

For more practice you can also try making yourself a User Page. If logged in, you should see your name near the top right of the page; click on your name to begin editing your user page. Basically this is something you can put in to let other people know who you are or (more commonly) about your PSU characters. Although there is no required structure for a user page, some designs have proven to be pretty popular, such as those of Qwerty, Kit, or EspioKaos. Don't let that discourage you from doing your own thing though. Be creative!

Manual of style

Once you've familiarized yourself with all those brackets and pipes that you'll type millions of times in the future, you're gonna need to check out an important document we call the manual of style. This is basically a standard of how we want articles in the PSUPedia to look, and it helps keep a uniform appearance around the site.

What do I do first?

Many people who contribute to PSUPedia do so to either correct errors on a certain page or perhaps add in some other information, and you're perfectly free to do so. Just make sure your information is actually accurate and not just opinion or conjecture, as neither of those are within this site's purpose.

Beyond that, most of the contributors are busy people and can't possibly handle everything that needs to be done around here, so you can check out our to-do list for specific things that we could use a little help with.

What next?

Raffon Field Base is our primary discussion area, where people toss around their ideas to improve the site and comment on those ideas. We're always looking for more input, suggestions, or even criticism (as long as it's presented constructively). You can also use this page if you need help with something as it's a page that most contributors read fairly regularly and you'll probably get a speedy response.

Speaking of help...

In addition to Raffon Field Base, you can contact the PSUPedia Staff via their user talk pages. They are all pretty helpful, though this guy has been known to be a little grumpy. Feel free to ask questions whenever you're in doubt, since they have a vested interest in making sure well-intentioned newbies don't make too many mistakes.

What does this mean?

While reading the PSUPedia, you'll likely come across tables with a few items highlighted in a certain color, mission or item names encased in parentheses and more. This is what it all means.

• When an item in a table is highlighted with a red background, it means that particular item has not been released in any version of the game.
• When an item in a table is highlighted with a blue background, it means that particular item currently is available only in the Japanese PC/PS2 version of the game.
• When you see an item, mission or location encased in parentheses, this signifies that the name given is a tentative, unofficial translation. Once an official translation has been released, the article name will be updated accordingly.

The PSUP Commandments

• Thou shalt use the "Show preview" button. Please preview your work and then submit one "Save page" edit when you are done instead of a bunch of small edits all in a row.

• Thou shalt proofread thy work. You don't have to be perfect, but at least make an effort to use proper English spelling and grammar.

• Thou shalt not copy others' work without permission. This applies primarily to images and content from other sites, such as PSO World. This and other wikis, like the JP Wiki, are under the GNU license and thus can be "stolen" from freely.

• Thou shalt not engage in edit wars. You should expect that anything you submit can be edited by anyone else at any time. If you disagree with an edit, talk it out on the discussion page for that article instead of just editing it back.

• Thou shalt keep thine opinions out of it. At the moment, PSUPedia's articles are a source of information only, not discussion, opinion, or conjecture. Discussions of things such as which Photon Art is "better" than another have no place in the article text.