Help:Creating your first wiki article

See also: Help:Making good wiki articles

New users should develop some significant mapping before adding too much to the wiki, reflect on our wiki policies and in particular: It is not necessary. The main purpose of the wiki is to describe what's on the map, so if a place has very little mapped, then there's no need to spend time filling the wiki with all sorts of detailed information about it. It can distract from mapping. If something is overwikified, then by definition it has only a limited amount of mapping. Every hour spent on the wiki is one less hour adding to the map. It can distract from developing mapping skills. Overwikification can be especially unfortunate for new users or others with limited mapping skills. Every hour spent on the wiki is one less hour that they could be developing their skills to become better mappers.

Get an account and log in

To get started, you'll need an account. If you are a member of Opengeofiction, send a message to admin to get your account. Please read the guidelines as well.

Once you have your account, click "Log In" in the upper right and log in.

Uploading images

You'll probably want to upload a few images (national flag, location map, national seal or coat of arms, etc.). This is easily done by clicking "Upload file" in the left hand menu. Be sure to give your files unique names, e.g. "MubblelandFlag.jpg" not just "Flag.jpg"

If you forget the image file names later on (you'll need to know the names to insert the images into your article) you can always go back and find them by looking in the Gallery of new files.

Creating an article

Copy another OGF country article

The easiest way to create an article for your country is to start with a copy of another country's article in the OGF Encyclopedia. Go to another country's page, click "Edit" in the upper right, and then copy all the text in the large text box. Then close the page without making any edits.

Create a page for your article

Then, create a new page for your article. This is done by simply typing a URL into your web browser:

https://wiki.opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/Mycountryname ← but replace "Mycountryname" with the short name of your country. Following the convention of Wikipedia, OGF article titles use the short name. For example:

• Kingdom of Mycountry
  
• Mycountrian Federation
  
• People's Democratic Socialist Republic of Mycountry
  
• Confederated States and Possessions of the Serene Principality of Mycountry
  
• Mycountry

If you're unsure, visit Wikipedia and check out what they do.

Once you've entered https://wiki.opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/Mycountryname (←replacing "Mycountryname" with your country's name) into your web browser, wiki will say "There is currently no text on this page." This means you can create the page by clicking "Create" in the upper right.

Paste and change

Then simply paste the article you copied from another country, and change everything from that country's information to your country's information. This may take a while, but you don't have to fill in everything right away; feel free to put "TBD" or "coming soon" or something like that for the sections that you plan to fill in later. Make sure you don't keep any information from the article you copied, though.

Include links

When writing your article, you can link to other articles in the OGF wiki by including [[brackets]] around a word. For example typing [[Gobrassanya]] will create a link to the article on Gobrassanya. You can add a link to articles that already exist (which will appear blue) or articles that you plan to write later (which will appear red, until you create the article). In Wikipedia articles, links are usually only used the first time a term is mentioned, not every time throughout the article.

Check and save

Before saving the page (with the "Save page" button) be sure to use the "Show Preview" button to preview your page and check for mistakes. If you're writing a long page, it's not unusual to use "Show Preview" 5 or 10 times before everything is fixed and the page is ready to go public.

If you have questions, feel free to ask. We'll be looking forward to learning about your country.