Contribute

Contributing to the DiPPSA wiki might seem overwhelming at first -- what are all these buttons? How do I know I'm on the right page? How do I format the page correctly? Fear not! These are all perfectly fine questions for someone who has never contributed to a wiki before, or even for someone contributing to our wiki for the first time.

**We encourage all users to sign up for a Wikia account before contributing to help keep everyone accountable for editing and adding content!**

**Enjoy the following bits of advice for contributing your own content to this wiki, or check out the Help:Contributing page and Tutorial Series for further instruction.**

## Creating a New Page

Let's begin at the beginning: what do you do if you have content to add to the wiki, but it doesn't quite fit any of the existing pages? Easy! Create your own.

There are three ways of going about. **First**, you can click on any **red links** you see around the site (a red link means the page does not exist yet) and choose the option for creating a new page with that link's name.

**Second,** you can type a new URL into your browser for a page that you would like to create. All pages on this wiki start with the address***http://dippsa.wikia.com/wiki*** - so if you wanted to add a page titled "Example" you would simply type in http://dippsa.wikia.com/wiki/Example. The wiki would then display a page like the one in the image above, allowing you to create the page. If you want to make a page's title contain multiple words, simply use an underscore in place of spaces. So a page entitled "Example One" would become http://dippsa.wikia.com/wiki/Example\_One.

**The third** option is to navigate to the "Contribute" dropdown menu (as seen on the Navigating the Wiki page), click on the button, and scroll down to "Add a Page". The wiki will prompt you to enter a title for your new page (no need to use underscores this time). If the page already exists it will give you a simple error message and ask you to rename your proposed page.

Congrats! You've just made a new page.

## Editing a Page

The next step is to edit your new page, or an already existing one. If you've never contributed to a wiki before, consider navigating to the Wikia Community Central page Making Your First Contribution and watch the brief tutorial video with information about being a good contributor for the community.

Once you understand the basics of being a good contributor, it's time to begin editing your own content on the DiPPSA wiki. The following video was created by the fine folks Wikia Community Central to help users navigate the often tricky wikia editing system.

If you're still confused, check out the Help:Editing page for more information about how the two editing styles work.

**If you want to test out your skills in a safe space before you begin editing for real, head on over to the PROVING GROUNDS and see if you can successfuly go through the provided checklist!**

## **Conforming to the Style Guide**

Please read over our standalone article on the DiPPSA Wiki Style Guide before you save your work!

## Protected Pages

In order to keep consistency in certain pages that are important to the site's structures, we have **protected** a handful of them from editing by anyone other than moderators. Here is the current list:

1. Home
2. About
3. FAQ
4. Contact Us
5. Style Guide
6. Community Guidelines

## Adding to the Navigation Bar

The Navigation Bar is permanently locked from editing by regular users. If you would like to see a change to any part of the DiPPSA Topics portion, please jump over to the Forums and make a post, or send a message to the moderators.

## **Final Steps**

Once you've made sure that your work is clear and concise and conforms to our style guide, there are just a few more things that you can do:

* Check your user contributions page and the pages of other contributors to see what people have been working on recently!
* Follow your pages to receive alerts when other people add or edit information.
* Make sure your page has been added to a category!
* **Double check - do your edits fit within our Community Guidelines?**

## Contribution Etiquette

Since the DiPPSA Wiki is a community resource, it is important that we all work as a team. Here are a few pieces of etiquette to compliment our **Community Guidelines.**

* This is a **team effort** - don't take it personally if someone edits your content to add depth or clarity. Nothing is inherently sacred on a wiki unless it is already **protected.** Conversely...
* Don't edit someone's content because of a minor disagreement with style or structure. Make sure your contributions add something significant to the discussion!

As always, feel free to reach out to your friendly neighborhood moderators for help.