DDO wiki:Editing guideline

This page is a stub, and please note, we are NOT trying to set rules on how you can't do this and that etc on this wiki. On this page, we are just trying to summarize how we have handled things in the past, and to summarize agreements we have met on particular subjects etc.

General guidelines

 * 1) Even if English is your second language, punctuation is always important.
 * 2) Lamannia data, should include  as the first line. This is to distinguish the fact that what is seen here, may not be final.
 * 3) Templates are your friend. Not only do they make things easier on you, but they look many times better than simple pages that look like they came from your word-pad. A list of (most) templates can be found Here.
 * 4) When posting a question on somebody's Talk page, or the Reference/Help desks,  is recommended. (Replace the X with whatever number the post is, if its the first, put 1, second put 2, ect)
 * 5) When Editing, the "Show Preview" button at the bottom of the page is your friend. Not only does it let you see what you've done, but you can also spot any places that might contain a broken template. (A single missed ] or } can break an entire page)
 * 6) When in doubt, Ask a regular. (You can find us by clicking the Recent Edits link)
 * 7) If you discover that something has changed in-game, feel free to correct it. If we revert said change, offer us proof, and we shall apologize.
 * 8) Keep it Civil. This is a place for the sharing of, and archiving information, not a Troll's Nest.
 * 9) This is likely the only absolute Rule you will find in this section, or for this site. Keep it Relevant. That means no advertisement pages for Copyrighted Fitness Product endorsed by a certain celebrity (Cough, Chuck), or Dating Services. Those sort of pages will be deleted shortly after being written, and you will be banned from editing even faster. Things not pertaining to DDO, Turbine, or Lamannia (with the exclusion of About Me and Talk pages) should be left to the Forums.
 * 10) And remember: Abusive words should be left in Rap Music and Xbox Live headsets.

Avoiding drama/edit war
Every single person has a different view on how things should be done. Time to time we argue on each other. It happens, but NEVER mess with the main article, always start a discussion on talk page. Be mature, respect each other and follow Wikiquette/common sense. If you can't do that, you can always start your own DDO informational site somewhere else. Remember, this is a wiki, which is about working together. Personal sites stop growing once the person loses interest to maintain, but wikis keep growing so long as healthy community is going. Don't start a drama/edit war, it can cause huge negative impact on that community and threaten the future of the site.

Wiki namespaces

 * (Main) - Everything related to DDO
 * User - About you. Your own stub, your own experimental pages. About your characters, and guilds. We once had pages to list in-game characters and guilds, but pages went way too obsolete and messy so we ended up deleting them all (woo...). Unlike other MMO wikis, we don't host such pages under (Main) namespace, so these kind of stuff should go to your own user page.
 * DDO wiki - Wiki-related documentations.
 * File - Images only. No audio files, no video files.
 * MediaWiki - Don't mess with it!
 * Template - Don't mess with it! ..unless you know what you are doing. Please.
 * Category - On other wikis, category pages usually are nothing more than background function of the site. On this site, we sometimes use category pages for site navigation (Category:DDO game mechanics, Category:Quests etc). That's because we are lazy, and because we are efficient. Downside of it is that we can't "move" such pages, we have to copy/paste actual text and lose revision history of the page when needed.
 * Help - help pages on editing.
 * Forum - Reference desk, Help desk, and Village pump. Tagging talk pages with and such puts them into these forums.

Terminology conflicts

 * "Quest" vs. "Adventure"
 * We take "Quest". See quest article for its definition.
 * "Enchantment" vs. "Enhancement"
 * For something written on items to describe its effect, we take "Enchantment". Not "Enhancements", "Weapon specs", nor "Item properties"!
 * "Unique" vs. "Named"
 * Discussion ongoing.
 * "Collectables" vs. "Collectibles"
 * Turbine-DDO uses "Collectables"; therefore, so do we.
 * Yes, we know spell-checker thinks it's wrong

Formatting
Not all the pages use templates. Yet, articles on the same category should share the same format to some extent. Ability pages are good example. Say you are planning on making significant change on Strength page, what you may wanna do is;
 * a) Keeping your editing minimal in order to keep it consistent with other ability pages.
 * b) Editing all other pages to match the formatting.
 * c) Are there way too many pages on the category to do it all by yourself? Ask for help/make a suggestion on talk page.

Images
Permitted file types: png, jpg, jpeg, gif, tif, tiff, bmp. Maximum file size: 2 MB.
 * No ".bmp" images! Use ".png".
 * No ".jpeg" file extension! Use ".jpg".
 * We often ignore 150K byte recommendation. But, please don't do something crazy like 1.5M byte jpeg. (How to crop/compress images? Google it baby!)
 * No external image hosting sites.

Misc.

 * "Sets of Armor" vs. "Armors": See Talk here: Armor vs. Armors.