Editor guidelines
While it's recommended to read and understand these guidelines, you shouldn't worry too much about following them to the letter.
More experienced contributors are more than happy to help new contributors fix any mistakes they may make while learning how to use the system.
What to do?
Look through the recent changes to see which pages have been most recently edited. It's always good to have new content double-checked by other contributors.
Browse through categories starting at the top level content to see if there are any areas you are interested in. There may also be areas you find lacking, or altogether missing.
Try to make sure a page doesn't already exist before creating a new one. Don't worry about this too much though, as a more experienced contributor will be able to see your new page when they check the recent changes and will help you resolve the issue.
Categories
Categories help us keep the wiki organized. Every page should have at least one category, but can also belong to several categories.
The contributor resources category contains many resources you may find useful as a contributor.
Images
If you find any articles missing images, or you have a better one, you are welcome to add it to the wiki!
To upload images, see: Special:Upload
Just like pages and categories themselves, images should be given a proper category to help keep the wiki organized.
Templates
Templates help us keep the wiki more consistent. Secondary skills are a good example of this. We can use a single template that requires just the name and description of the skill. The template then uses the name to get the correct images, and then takes those images, the name, and the description, and puts them all together in a consistent manner for each different skill. Most templates provide instructions and examples to help beginners.
You can also study the existing templates on the wiki. When you open a page preview, you can scroll down to a line of text with a dropdown arrow that reads "Templates used in this preview". You can click this dropdown to show any templates the current page is using. You can read these templates and then study how they are used on that page.
For a complete list of templates, see: All Templates.
For help creating templates, see: Template Help
As a small example of what templates can do, here are a few text templates we use to keep our references to Heroes of Might and Magic III consistent throughout the wiki:
| Template | Effect |
|---|---|
| {{homm}} | Heroes of Might and Magic III |
| {{roe}} | Restoration of Erathia |
| {{hommroe}} | Heroes of Might and Magic III: Restoration of Erathia |
| {{ab}} | Armageddon's Blade |
| {{sod}} | Shadow of Death |