Skyway City Wiki Guide

Alright, boys. We've got enough content generated for this little world of ours that we've gone and got ourselves our own wiki.

Overview
Mostly, what you need to concern yourself with in contributing to this wiki is getting familiar with the way Wikia does its markup. To that end, go here to learn about some of the more common ways to markup text. The simplest thing you should mos' def' pick up is the fact that doing this in the Source Editor: Skyway City Chronicle will accomplish this: Skyway City Chronicle

No need to put in a URL. Just put in the actual name of the page you want it to go to. And if you want the linked text to say another thing but go to a different location, do this instead: The Story So Far... (Dig that funky pipe action.)

Want to link to something outside of the wiki? Single brackets and the entire URL, yo:

If you want the linked text to say something else, you do something a little different than the above example: Feeling lucky? Note how all of that is contained within the single brackets and merely a space is used to separate it from the link URL (instead of using a pipe). Easy peasy.

Want italics? Wrap two pairs of single quotes (or apostrophes, whatever) around your text like so: Italics!

How about bold? Add triple single quotes around it: Bold, motherfucker!

Wait, you want bold and italics? Use five (that is, 2+3) of them, greedy: You probably also want a pony.

It's pretty simple, really. But I suppose you could always just use the Visual Editor instead of getting all up in the code. It's fine. I won't judge you. To your face, anyway.

Adding A New Standard Content Page
Firstly, make sure you're in Visual Editor mode (which should be the default setting). This is the basic process for the majority of the content pages.


 * 1) Click on the CONTRIBUTE button on the top right of most pages of the wiki. From there, select ADD A PAGE.
 * 2) At the prompt, type in the name of the new page (following established conventions) and hit enter or ADD A PAGE. From there, you will be taken to a text editor page.
 * 3) Before you start doing anything, let's maintain the format that's been setup for the Skyway City Chronicle by adding in the Infobox that appears to the top right. To do this, click INSERT and select TEMPLATE.
 * 4) In the search box, type in or at least start to type in the name of the infobox associated with the article type in question (see below). Select it when it becomes available as an option to click on.
 * 5) A dialog box will now pop up prompting you to fill it out. Please maintain the format. Look at an already populated page to see how that is.
 * 6) When you're done with that and have been returned to the Visual Editor, you should see that the infobox is nice and populated on the right. Now, currently it is the thing that is selected. Click anywhere to the left of the infobox to put the cursor to the left of it.
 * 7) Now let's add the content via another template. Click INSERT and select TEMPLATE again.
 * 8) This time, type in the name of the appropriate content template for the article type (see below) and select it when it becomes available. Much like with the infobox earlier, you fill the dialogue window that comes up. Mind you, you're essentially dropping in text in the Source Editor mode so you're going to need to add the markup described above if you want some linking or other formatting to happen.
 * 9) When you're done and you've been returned to the Visual Editor, click the PUBLISH button. You will be prompted to describe the changes you made in the little box. Write something in there, will ya? Then complete the action.

Templates To Use Per Boilerplate Page
To make things easier for everyone and, more importantly, maintain consistency and organization throughout the wiki, there are several existing boilerplates to use for the various common types of articles that populate it. For the most part, each article type starts off with an infobox and has a content area (with a built in Table of Contents) that provides it with a uniform structure.

Content Guidelines
Should you want to do something slightly different than what is represented in the standard content pages mentioned above, look around the wiki first to see if someone hasn't already done something similar. There may be an article that has already established precedent so be sure to check before potentially screwing up the otherwise standardized formatting. Here are some general rules of thumb to follow:

Case Sensitivity is Important
'Nuff said.

Wikia is Dumb When It Comes to Spacing
You will likely need to double-space your content so that everything doesn't run together. For sections that are too close to another (especially when they're not separated by a header or subheader), throw in another carriage return or even a  tag in the source code.

Subsections & Sub-subsections
If you want to add a subsection to an existing section in a content template (do note that each field filled out represents the text to appear beneath a disparate section heading), demarcate the content within that particular section's text with a level three heading (that is to say, ===Some Subsection Title=== ) preceding it and go from there. Do note that whatever subsections you are adding will now appear as part of the Table of Contents. Simply bolding a heading (which is useful should you wish to list the elements that comprise something, for example) versus making each list item a separate subsection unto itself may achieve what it is you are looking to accomplish.

Just The Facts
In articles like the various that make up The Skyway City Chronicle, please try to stick to what actually transpired in the game session. If in the course of writing it up you can't help but indulge a digression, stick that lovely and amusing content in a related Talk page. To do so, create a new page called Talk:(and whatever the page's name is) and throw all of it there. Be sure to sign your block of text with ~, which adds a lovely timestamp along with your name.

Also, you could always just throw the digression into a comment in the comments section at the foot of the article.

Very Granular Detail
In the interest of keeping things somewhat tidy, please keep descriptions of a character's abilities or equipment at a fairly high level. Should you need to go on and on for paragraphs describing these particular traits, then they probably deserve their own articles. Moreover, try to keep info that appears on character pages in descriptive terms versus game mechanics terms. So, for instance, Citizen Archer should list some of his trick arrows on his character info article, sure, but an in-depth description of all of them should very well live on a more comprehensive List of Trick Arrows used by Citizen Archer article.

If you want to have your actual character sheet (numbers and everything) on this wiki as part of your character info article, make a character sheet article (template forthcoming) in addition to your character description and provide links between the two. That'll keep the page from running way too long as well as make specific info (be it rules or descriptions) easier to find.

Categories
Please categorize yo' shit. It helps to populate the first tier pages that the nav points to as well as makes things easier to find. Originally, the boilerplates were built with specific categories baked in as a sort of default but that resulted in the template modules themselves showing up in a category's listings (which is dumb). So, please make sure stuff is categorized.

To add a category, just use the add category functionality at the bottom of the article (in the read view and not the edit view). Type in the name, hit enter and then click Save when you're done. Do note that certain things may fall into multiple categories (and sub-categories, at that). For instance, Reichstadt would be categorized as Category:Places as well as Category:Abroad. Please be sure to do them in order of most inclusive category and then the sub-category.

Available (and planned for) categories:
 * Chronicle
 * Setting
 * Characters
 * Player Characters
 * NPCs
 * Organizations
 * Businesses
 * Supergroups
 * Villain Groups
 * Places
 * Local
 * Out of Town
 * Abroad
 * Beyond
 * Objects & Devices

Now, here's an annoying thing:

Say you want to link some text to a Category page. One would think you could simply do:. But, no. That bit of code would actually categorize the page as the whatever category. Instead, you need to do this: Whatever Text. That preceding colon is key.

Player Names
For the sake of convenience, redirect pages have been setup for player names (including the GM) that point to their associated User page on this wiki. You always have the option to manually (i.e., pipelink) to their User page but this should make things easier.

Names Beginning with "The"
For organizations and characters with "The" as the first part of their name, create the article page without the "The". Later, create an article page with the name including the "The" and make that redirect to the non-The version. Linking to either will work fine.

Player Character Stories & Character Comics
If you want to add some of your character's adventures (be they in the past or orthogonal to the campaign story), start up a character comic. It's like a personal chronicle.

That said, first you're going to need to create a comics page that is paired with your character.
 * 1) Go to Skyway City Chronicle, go into its source and copy it to your clipboard.
 * 2) Add a page, calling it "CharacterName (comics)" (putting in your character's name in there and without the quotation marks, of course).
 * 3) Go into the source code editor and paste what's on your clipboard. Update the intro text to whatever you like and change the category at the bottom to Setting instead of Chronicle (as this fiction doesn't take place in-game).
 * 4) Clean up the links in the bulleted list section (understanding the formatting is the important thing here) and, perhaps, populate it with the name of your first issue. It's not recommended that you name your comic after your character's name (because it will look terrible in the issue navigation). However you name it, use the format $ComicName Issue $IssueNumber per issue. (Don't use the # symbol; Wikia does not like that in article titles.)
 * 5) Publish.
 * 6) Link to this page from your character's article page.

Now, for your individual issues:
 * 1) Add a page, following the $ComicName Issue $IssueNumber format mentioned above.
 * 2) Click Insert, select Template and click on Character Comic Content.
 * 3) Fill this out.
 * 4) Publish.
 * 5) Repeat as needed, updating the character's (comics) page with the new issues as necessary.

Can't Find What You Need
If in the course of writing up some article, you feel like the addition of a new template, boilerplate or even category (or sub-category) would really help things out, just ask. These things can easily (okay, maybe not easily) be made.