SWG Wiki:New user guide

**SWG Wiki wants you!** Star Wars Galaxies enthusiasts from around the world are working together to build the most comprehensive SWG resource on the Internet, and we need your help! Like every wiki website, our success depends on the dedication of our contributing authors, who work tirelessly to bring you accurate information on everything related to Star Wars Galaxies. Why don't you create an account and help out?

Coordinating hundreds of authors over the Internet is a very difficult task, so we ask that everyone read our **help page** before contributing; it'll be painless, we promise! Doing so will make maintaining SWG Wiki a much easier task for everyone.

Please use this article's talk page for discussions about the site in general.

## Getting Involved

***Anyone* can contribute to SWG WIKI. Any improvements to the site would be welcome, whether it's updating, correcting, or adding missing pages, sections links, background, or tips/suggestions.**

So you'd like to help out? Here are some tasks you can work on to get your feet wet:

* **NGE Changes:**  If you stumble over an article that is not valid anymore (mostly articles about features that were removed from the game) add this piece of code to the top of the page:

```
{{Pre-NGE}}

```

* In order to contribute, you must sign up a user name. Click on your user name to write/edit your user page to let others know about you, your SWG characters, and your contributions/interests.
* A complete, final version of a page or section isn't required in order to contribute. Any additional relevant information that you know is always appreciated, and will help make SWG WIKI a more complete Star Wars Galaxies information source. If you don't know something, chances are someone else does and can add it later.
* Expand one of our many stub articles
* Respond to a request for comments
* Monitor recent changes and recent discussions to help with articles other authors are working on
* Clean up articles that don't adhere to a high standard of quality
* Review our wanted articles and see if you can help fill a demand
* See if you can find appropriate categories to associate with uncategorized pages

## Important pages for a Swikipedian

* To find what has recently been added and changed, click on **Recent changes** in the Navigation menu in the left margin. This is often an easy way to find something to add or correct, and can lead to pages that are in need of further contributions. You can also find new pages of interest this way.
* To quickly find recent additions to talk pages, click on **Recent discussions** in the Navigation menu in the left margin. Any article can have a talk page by editing its discussion tab.
* The **Wanted pages** lists pages that have not been created, but that have several links directed to them. You can find the Wanted pages from the **Special pages** link at the bottom of the Toolbox menu on the left margin.
* When you create a page (or edit an unwritten page), you can click on **What links here** in the Toolbox menu on the left margin. You will see a list of pages that contains a link to that page. This can be helpful in finding pages that are missing links, or to see what else has been written about a topic.

## Editing Tips

Read on and learn how to edit some pages:

* To make a word or phrase a SWG WIKI link, add 2 brackets ([) on each side. The text must be the title of the page. Capitalization doesn't matter for the first letter of the link, but all other characters must be exact. Before you create a new page, make sure it doesn't exist already.
* To make the link text different than the linked page title, place a | (shift-back slash) after the page name, followed by the link text. [[Incapacitated|Incaped]] >> Incaped To just add to the end of the page name for the link, add those characters after the brackets. For example, [[Entertainer]]s >> Entertainers links to the Entertainer page, not the Entertainers page, because the "s" is after the brackets.
* To view the title of the page a link is connected to, hover the mouse over the link to see the tooltip.
* To make a link to a site outside of SWG WIKI, place the address inside *one* pair of brackets. To rename the link, insert a space after the address and then type the link text, which would be followed by the closing bracket.
* To link to a heading within a page, use the format [[page name#heading]]. For example, CDEF Pistol is a heading on the Pistols page. The link to jump to that part of the page would be [[Pistols#CDEF Pistol]]. If the heading isn't present on the page, you simply jump to the top of the page. CDEF Pistol As you can see, the tooltip only gives the title of the page.
* To add *italics* emphasis, surround the text with 2 apostrophes on each side. ''italics'' To use **bold**, use 3 apostrophes on each side. '''bold''' HTML commands for text work as well, if desired.
* If you use a website to gather info that isn't widely known or easily found in-game, simply add credit to the website at the bottom of the page. You must get permission from the author to use a guide on the site. Invite them to copy/write it up themselves! :)
* Links that lead to written pages will be blue. Artisan for example. Links to unwritten pages will be red (by default). Profession Name for example. If you preview a page edit, links will be updated to show whether the linked pages exist. This can be an easy way to check spelling and format of links to written pages.
* For a guide on how to format a new page, see the **Templates** page for many examples. Simply edit the page, copy the text, and paste that into the new page's edit page. Then replace the generic titles, links, and info as appropriate.
* Follow the example of other pages and sections for the format for links and page titles. The templates give examples of most of these. If you're unsure whether a page has been written yet (for a link), or if it's formatted correctly, open a new window and search for it in the search bar. If it's typed exactly, you will jump to that page.

## Wiki tweaks

Atombender and InfluenzaSWTA have spent many hours customizing MediaWiki to fit the unique needs of SWG Wiki. If you're interested, these are some of the features they've added:

### Recent discussions

Recent changes tracks edits to all pages throughout the site, which can make it difficult to track discussions on article "talk" pages. Tandalo requested a "recent discussions" special page which would only track edits to talk pages, namely to the namespaces Talk, SWG Wiki talk, Template talk, Category talk, and Help talk. This feature was created at the Special:Recentdiscs page.

The gory details (for the PHP-savvy) involved making a copy of the built-in SpecialRecentChanges.php and editing a SQL SELECT statement to only select changes where the article's namespace is either 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, or 15 (representing "talk" namespaces). The files SpecialPage.php and Language.php also had to be edited to support links to the new special page.

### TALK variable

Mediawiki includes many built-in variables that act like templates but are replaced by different values depending on the page they're placed in (an example of this is the {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} variable used on the main page). Many of our site templates use these variables to automatically generate links to talk pages, archives, and other sub-pages throughout the wiki. However, there is no default variable for inserting the namespace of an article's talk page; this is a problem when using templates that create links to talk pages, because the default method for doing so doesn't work on Category and Template pages (it creates links to Talk:Community portal instead of SWG Wiki talk:Community portal). The {{TALK}} variable was added to solve this problem: it will always return the correct prefix for an article's talk page, whether it be Category talk, Template talk, SWG Wiki talk, or just the generic Talk.