DDO wiki:Editing guideline

General Guidelines

 * 1)  Even if English is your second language -- punctuation, spelling, and grammar are always important.  Please make a good faith attempt to make your edits legible to others.
 * 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, etc...).
 * 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 your change, offer us proof, and we shall verify and 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 products 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 slight exceptions for a frequent editor's About Me and Talk pages - links to other sites will be permitted there as long as it's not pure spam) should be left to the Forums.
 * 10) Please 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 with 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 them, but wikis keep growing so long as healthy community is going. Don't start a drama/edit war, it can cause a huge negative impact on that community and threaten the future of the site.

Wiki counter-editing etiquette, aka "editquette":

There is an accepted process for politely disagreeing with an edit, without escalating to an "edit war". The flow usually goes something close to this...


 * 1) There is an article that Editor A thinks needs editing.
 * 2) Editor A edits it. At this point, they don't have to include a "reason"* in the "Summary", but it's considered a "best practice" if it's not obvious why the change was made.
 * (* This is not 100% necessary, especially for "minor" edits, but it's always appreciated, regarless.)
 * 3) Editor B notices this, any time afterward, and decides they have something better - and either changes it to a third version (and we go back to step #2), or reverts it back to what it was before. Reverting always requires a "reason" why the newer version was not acceptable (to Editor B). If you reverse something without an explanation, it's generally not considered an acceptable edit, and Editor A has every right to reverse it back before going to step 4.
 * 4) Editor A does not agree with Editor B's changes. Assuming Editor B gave reasons, Editor A does not change anything, but takes their view to the /Discussion page for that article, and gives their reasons for keeping their edit over the reversal. All editors, including Editor B, can post their thoughts, and all can engage in a (polite!) exchange of views on the subject, and a consensus is reached (perhaps resulting in yet another version). This can be quick, or can take several weeks (or more!) if it's a complex discussion.
 * 5) An edit is made based on that consensus.
 * 6) And then, sometime later, Editor C comes along and changes it all again, and we start over - it's inevitable. Don't get too attached to "your" work, it's a community project.

Page/File Deletion

 * Review the Deletion policy

Page Naming (Captilization, Disambiguations, etc)

 * Review the Naming policy

Wiki Namespaces

 * (Main) - Everything related to DDO
 * User - About you; this is your own stub, your own experimental pages, 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 this kind of stuff should go to your own user page.
 *     - Wiki-related documentations.
 * File - Images only. No audio files, no video files. Image and Media were deprecated in a previous revision of the MediaWiki software we use, so do not use these.
 * MediaWiki - This is where administrators can make changes to the user interface of the wiki. However, not all interfaces are editable.
 * Template - Don't mess with it! ...unless you know what you are doing. Please and thank you.
 * Category - On other wikis, category pages are sometimes 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, Category:Items etc). That's because DDO is an extremely complex game with a vast array of mechanics, items, quests, etc. Downside of this is that we can't directly "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.
 * Item - Pages related to items. Loot, gear, collectables, craftables, etc.

Terminology Conflicts

 * Review the terminology conflict section of our naming policy.

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;  Keeping your editing minimal in order to keep it consistent with other ability pages. Editing all other pages to match the formatting. 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 do not do anything crazy like 1.5M byte jpeg.
 * How to crop/compress images?
 * There are multiple programs out there that can help you accomplish this, each one is tailored to a different style editor. You may wish to try many different ones before picking one. Some examples are:
 * New Windows computers often offer "Windows Live Photo Gallery"
 * Newer and older Windows computers offer a variation of "Paint." Some older system call this "MS-Paint."
 * No external image hosting sites.
 * See the Naming policy for more details.

Misc.

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