E&P Wiki Style Guide

It is important than in building out the wiki we do so with a uniform voice so as to avoid confusion at all costs.  We have all sorts of players using the wiki on a daily basis and they cannot all be expected to know the slang that is regularly thrown about on the forums.  To assist in the creation of new pages, the following guidelines should be followed to whatever degree as you deem reasonable:

## Editing & Writing Articles

### **Creating Links**

Quality links are integral to a wiki's usability.  If a concept would take more than one paragraph to express, it is worthy of a link and its own individual page.  Whether that page exists at present or not, create a link to it.

When you create new pages, consider what people might use as their search terms and create a Redirect for that search term to the appropriate page (for instance:  Kestrel is a redirect to Captain Kestrel).  The purpose behind this is that broken links show up on the Wanted Pages list, and since they show red on the page, those of us who visit that page recognize the need and just might create the page in question.

*Ideally* only the first mention of a particular page should actually be linked... That said, sometimes that would require scrolling up fairly far to find... if you find such is the case, feel free to create a new link.  If the page/link in question is a part of a table, the first time it is mentioned within that table should *definitely* have a full link, regardless of what appears on the rest of the page.  It's better that we use too many links than too few.  That said, use discretion.  :-)

### **Using Inline Images**

In-line images are very helpful to a wiki's appearance and intelligibility. Many keywords throughout the wiki should have an inline image preceding it, like the following examples:

25,000  Food
5,000  Iron
You will need to use the **source editor** to change the size to **24px** and the vertical alignment to **bottom**. It should be noted that these images also work as thumbnails. Standard sizes **48px**, **64px**, **92px**, and **128px** should render well without fuzziness. Larger sizes may appear blurry, but if it's necessary, standard size **192px** may look okay. A complete list of inline images can be found in the **Inline Images Category**.

*— private1stbrass (talk)* 08:20, January 26, 2019 (UTC)

### **Creating Stubs**

This section is a stub. Please help the Empires and Puzzles Wiki by expanding it, adding pictures, and improving existing text.Sometimes, you have an article that, although providing some useful information, is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, and could be expanded in some way. These articles are called stubs, and must have the **{{stub}}** template at the top of the page. When only a particular section needs expansion, you should put the **{{section-stub}}** template at the top of the section instead. These templates automatically add the article to the Article stubs category as well. You can search this category to find articles to expand at any time.

*— private1stbrass (talk)* 00:44, January 27, 2019 (UTC)
### **Text Colors**

You can now add text colors to the wiki!  To do so, simply take a peek at the source code for:  ​Defense​

Here's a list of the color names that you can use in lieu of 'royalblue', should you like.

## Always Create Redirects

Please create pages with caps, such as "Special Skills", but also be sure to create a redirect from the other relevant versions of that phrase that people might use to search, such as:

* Specials
* Special skills
* Special skill
* Special Skill

Unfortunately, most wiki are wholly case sensitive and don't have options for case insensitive searching... so we have to create redirects in order to assist our users in that fashion. Case only matters for page titles that are more than one word as the first word is defaulted to caps at all times.

### How to create a redirect:

1. Create a New Page, but in Visual Editor mode.
2. Click the 3-bar dropdown in the top menu, select "Options"
3. Check the box for "Redirect this page to"
4. Put the name of the correct page in the line below that checkbox
5. No text will appear in the Visual Editor - it was only added to the Source. Save the page.

## Terminology

### Elements

The game never speaks of colors, but of *elements*.  We should always refer to the elements when possible.  Exception: there is no such term as "element stacking", but rather "color stacking".  Because 'element stacking' does not exist, the act of stacking multiple heroes of the same element should be referred to as "color stacking" as seen on the teams page.

### Stages

Each node on the Season 1 and Season 2 map is called a 'stage'.  This is to avoid confusion with the game's other terms.  There are Missions and Quests, which are each entirely different game elements.  Links for stages (such as 8-7) should actually link to the province page (S1: Province 8) and then a new section on that Province page should be created for the relevant stage.  Be conservative so as to not overwhelm the page with tons of stages.  Ideally only one stage should be highlighted per province.

### Quests and Events

Quests rotate in and out on a 24hr basis, while Rare Quests are a different beast entirely that show up approximately every other week.  There are Challenge Events that rotate on a monthly basis, as well as Seasonal Events which are associated with particular holidays/seasons of the year.  These are all horribly confusing - again, please do your best to maintain in-game terminology throughout.  :-)

## Adding New Heroes

When adding a new hero, their Hero Card goes first:  left justified, 300px preview.  After that, there is a template that you need to add to the page called "Hero".  Fill out each of the blanks in the form (as much as possible - the 'image' is no longer possible without the work of the original wiki's artist), and all should be well.  Here's how to grab the neat-and-clean Hero Card that is currently in use:

1. Take a screenshot of the card in question on your phone.
2. Download any original Hero Card GIF from the current wiki.
3. "Edit" the Sample Hero Card that you downloaded in Paint 3D (pre-installed program on Windows 10).
4. "Edit" the screenshot that you took, also in Paint 3D.
5. Use "Magic Select"  and narrow the field down so that it outlines the hero card with a small buffer of space, click through to "Done".  It will process for a second, then the card will bounce a little, now only having the card itself selected rather than the entire screenshot.
6. Flip back to the Sample Hero Card that you downloaded.  Press CTRL + A to select all, then press 'delete' to clear out the current image.
7. On the now-blank Sample Hero Card, press CTRL + V to paste your new Hero Card into the Sample Card template.  It should fit perfectly into the window.
8. Save the new card as "Name - Hero Card" where 'name' is the hero's name.  Be sure to save the card as a GIF.  This is because only GIF and PNG can have transparency and the GIF is a much smaller file than the PNG.
9. Upload your card to the wiki for use.  :-)

Also, any time that you add a new hero to the database you should take care to categorize it well.  The categories utilized for heroes on this wiki are many.  They include the fact that it's a hero in general, what star level it is, what element it belongs to, what source it comes from (TC20, Atlantis, Christmas Heroes, etc), as well as if it serves a particular role as a Defensive hero or a Sniper, for instance.  To see all of the current categories for consideration, please see the bottom of the Hero Information page.
Please remember to add the new hero to the appropriate Class page as well.

## Adding Any New Page

1. **Double check that the page in question doesn't already exist** under a different name, for instance "Events" exists as a redirect to "Challenge Events".  Even if Events didn't have a redirect, you should check out the Challenge Events page before creating an Events page.
2. **Always try to incorporate an image** for the page.  In an ideal world, one image per section.  Take care, though, to manage their size and placement well.  Use the Mobile and Desktop previews to your advantage.
3. **Use in-game terminology** where possible and reasonable.
4. **Links are crucial** to wiki functionality.  If you are using an in-game term, the first time that you use that term on that page should be a link.  If you are creating tables, then each individual table should have the first time an item is mentioned linked.
5. To **link to categories** (like all of those hero categories, or event categories), it may be done by putting the following inside double brackes:    :Category:CATEGORYNAME|TEXT      See the Source tab for this page to confirm the following example:   Heroes of the Month
6. **Use "Heading 2" for section titles** and "normal" for regular text.  The Table of Contents will automatically be generated if enough sections are created in this manner.
7. **Always provide attribution** to sources, especially when it comes to graphics.  If the source is an individual on the forums, their forum profile should be linked to directly, otherwise the website that serves as the source should be credited and the website added to Sources and Resources.
8. **Always add a category** to your page!  Sometimes more than one.  I am a fan of the Gameplay one.  It shouldn't be included on things like the Farm, even though that is a part of one's gameplay... it has no intricate actions involved in it... but it IS on the Training Camp page because that's a complex gameplay choice.  Basically, the Gameplay category should be used if you believe that the page deserves attention as a part of a 'tutorial'.  To see what categories are utilized and possible, click on the "Category" link at the top or bottom of any given page.  There are a lot of them.
9. **Always leave an Edit Summary**, even if it's a short one.

## Tabber:

### **Making Tabbed Tables**

Tabber is a fairly simple bit of code that we put in the Source portion of the page in order to enable the tabs that you see on pages similar to Ascension.

To use Tabber, all you do is place the sideways carots <> around the word 'tabber' before the first item, then put a |-| before any future item.  Be sure to close it with a /tabber inside the carots at the end of your final tabbed page.  Again, see the Ascension page's Source code for an example on how it is done.

### **Modifying Tabbed Tables**

To edit information within tabbed tables, one may do it one of two ways:

* Edit the information in the Source code... it's a bit convoluted if you do it there.  Not highly recommended.
* You could go into Source, highlight and CUT the carots <> as well as the word -'tabber', then go back to the Visual side, make your edits to the table, then return to the Source and paste the carots + tabber back into position where it was before.