Difference between revisions of "Help:Contents"

Revision as of 13:50, 24 January 2013

Just like any other wiki, the HoboWars Help Wiki has both community and editing standards, for the purpose of maintaining a user-friendly, helpful, consistent resource for everything related to HoboWars.

Keep in mind that the contents of this page can change over time; therefore, be sure to check this page periodically for changes.

General Rules

Any action that is illegal to do on any HoboWars version is also illegal to do on this Help Wiki. This is includes but is not limited to:

• Creating multiple Help Wiki accounts.
• Sharing Help Wiki accounts (letting someone else besides you access your Help Wiki account).
• Uploading or posting pornographic or prejudiced content (this includes links to sites that host such content).
• Selling your Help Wiki account.
• Advertising in-game services and events, other online games, referral links, and real-life products and services.
• Abusing bugs or glitches.
• Giving away your Help Wiki account upon deciding to stop editing the Help Wiki.
  
  

Additionally, any action that is generally condemned or prohibited by other wiki communities is also condemned and prohibited on the HoboWars Help Wiki. This includes but is not limited to:

• Vandalism.
• Trolling.
• Griefing.
• Sock puppetry.
• Using the Help Wiki as a personal file host.
• Disrespecting the administrators.
  
  

Finally, there is one very important rule unique to the HoboWars Help Wiki:

• All Help Wiki editors must be in good standing on all of the HoboWars versions they play.
  

"Good standing" means that that Help Wiki editor is not currently jailed. If a Help Wiki editor is jailed on any HoboWars version they play, they may be blocked from editing the Help Wiki until their jailing sentence is complete. Additionally, if a Help Wiki editor is permanently jailed (366'd) on any HoboWars version, or had their account deleted on any HoboWars version as a form of punishment, their Help Wiki account will either be blocked indefinitely or deleted.

Punishments

Any Help Wiki editor that engages in any of the aforementioned illegal activities, or any kind of activity that is deemed harmful to the growth and helpfulness of the HoboWars Help Wiki, will be blocked from editing the Help Wiki, with the length of the block reflecting the severity of their offense. Repeat offenders will expect to see progressively longer blocks from editing.

Also, if deemed necessary, Help Wiki editors who violate the rules of the HoboWars Help Wiki can also face punishment across all of the HoboWars versions they play.

General Policies

As a Help Wiki editor, your main duties are to add content to, maintain, clean up, organize, update, and verify the information in the HoboWars Help Wiki; in other words, your job is to make changes to the Help Wiki so that the information it contains is up-to-date and factually correct.

However, there are a few policies you need to adhere to while editing the Help Wiki, in order to guarantee that your changes are constructive and useful.

• Know your facts!
  • Think for a second. Do you really know anything about the subject you're writing about? Don't start a page that would be better off as a simple footnote in a full article. If you think something deserves a full article, find some people who know more things and collaborate.
• Is it important?
  • Let's say you own a cat named "Fluffy". Or a gang named "The Fluff". Or you named your racing cart "Fluffykins". Do we need to know? No, not really. Please refrain from including irrelevant and relatively unimportant information or facts. When in doubt, ask yourself, "Does anyone care?"
• Don't speculate.
  • You may have a theory on some part of the game. However, unlike with science, theory will get you nowhere. Don't post your beliefs until you can back it up and make it law. Of course, if there is currently no law on the subject, only speculation, it can't hurt to post popular theories. Just make sure you explicitly state that no one really knows. That is the important part.
• Don't be vain.
  • Certain pages need to be signed, such as userpages and discussion pages. Other pages, such as actual tutorial or reference pages, should not be signed. It looks sloppy and remember: you're not the only contributor. There's no need to weigh down the bottom of the article with signatures.
• Use your userpage as your sandbox!
  • If you don't know if something is notable, important, or factual, you can always create a page under your userpage (e.g. User:<yourname>/<pagename>) and put it there. This is also useful for creating "rough drafts" of pages. Once you are finished, you can ask someone to stop by and review the page. If it qualifies as a page in the Help Wiki, it can be moved to the appropriate place.
• Use lists sparingly.
  • Don't just simply write off facts in list form; actually combine them into a paragraph. The information will flow more easily that way.
• Link, link, link!
  • Link articles! Make connections, so people can go on a yellow brick road adventure through the HoboWars Help Wiki and come out with ruby red slippers and a cardboard tutorial diploma. Just make sure your links are meaningful! Please don't insert a link into a page that doesn't deserve it.
• Your userpage is not your main contribution.
  • Don't focus too much time prettying up your userpage; your userpage should be a simple page with information on which HoboWars versions you play, and how you can be most easily contacted. You do not need to show off all of your accomplishments or brag about how many you've been message board banned on your userpage.
• Userpages exist for a reason!
  • Do not create a normal Help Wiki page about yourself without asking permission first. Usually, the only people who deserve their own Help Wiki page are HoboWars staff members, especially if they are historically significant or important. If you desire a place to post information about yourself, then use your userpage instead!
• Individual gang pages are not necessary.
  • The HoboWars Help Wiki is not an extension of your gang board or your gang announcements page, nor is it a place to recruit players for your gang. Besides, gangs come and go, change names, merge, and go inactive, so it is a pain maintaining pages about them. Unless your gang has some sort of historical significance in a HoboWars version, it does not need a place in the HoboWars Help Wiki.
• When in doubt, ask!
  • If you are not sure how to do something, or are confused about how to do something properly, don't hesitate to ask other Help Wiki editors!
• Disagreements happen.
  • Suppose you make a change, but another editor doesn't agree it's necessary and reverts it. If you disagree with that editor's reversion, try to contact them and discuss the change with them. Don't engage in edit wars with other editors; it wastes time that could be spent bettering other parts of the Help Wiki. If you have any disputes that can't seem to be settled, contact an administrator to have to matter settled.
• Administrators have the final say.
  • If an administrator comes along and tells you not to do something, please don't do it. The worst thing you can do is ignore an administrator's advice. If you disagree with an administrator, try to contact him/her and discuss the issue. If you are unsatisfied with an administrator's decision, you can always contact a bureaucrat.
• Be bold!
  • If you are just starting out, don't be afraid to make that change you've always wanted to make. If your change violates any of the Help Wiki policies, it will simply be reverted; THE WORLD WILL NOT END. However, be sure to learn from your mistakes. Have fun editing!

Chain of Command

Andy > Wiki Bureaucrats > Wiki Administrators > Wiki Editors

It's as simple as that.

Editing Standards

The HoboWars Help Wiki has various standards on editing set so that edits and formatting are consistent from page to page.

Page Naming Conventions

All page names are treated like a title of a novel, meaning that the first word and all of the words in the page's name are capitalized; the only words that aren't capitalized are short prepositions (e.g. of), conjunctions (e.g. and), and articles (e.g. the). Also, the names of pages on any in-game subject are to be spelled and capitalized exactly the same as they are in-game. For example, a page about the "Trolly" is to be named "Trolly", not "Trolley". Likewise, a page about the "Temporary Tattoo Parlor" is to be named "Temporary Tattoo Parlor", not "Temporary Tattoo Parlour". Unless the spelling or capitalization of the page's subject changes in-game, the Help Wiki is not the place to reflect a regional spelling difference or a spelling correction.

Comma Usage

We use serial commas. A serial comma is the comma that comes right after the list item that comes right before the and/or/nor in a list of things. For example:

The current major game locations are the City, Second City, Hoburbia, and Canbodia.

The serial comma is the comma that comes immediately right after the word "Hoburbia".

Tables

All information tables (i.e. ones that list items), are to have a border thickness of 3.

{| border="3"
| Table with a border thickness of "3".
|}

Tables that simply house a picture can either have a border thickness of "1" or "0". However, if the table houses any text, then the table should have a border thickness of at least "1". When in doubt, take a look at other pages with tables in them and see what the border thickness of those pages' tables are.

The color of a table's header reflects the type of information in that column:

• Black = ID and Details/Notes/Comments
  • Generally, black is for the thing's numerical ID, if it has one. Black is also used for any extra piece of information pertaining to the listed thing.
• White = Image
  • Generally, white is for images.
• Blue = Name
  • Generally, blue is for names and titles.
• Green = Cost/Gain
  • Generally, green is for the first piece of information pertaining to the listed thing; this is usually the cost of the thing or its benefits.
• Red = Stats/Effect
  • Generally, red is for the second piece of information pertaining to the listed thing; this is usually the stats of the thing or its effects.
• Orange = Range/Stats per Level
  • Generally, orange is for ranges and intervals.
• Light Blue = Base Stats
  • Generally, light gray-blue (#388E8E) is for the base stats of the listed thing.
• Purple = Duration/BAC Gain
  • Generally, purple is for the duration or blood alcohol content gain of the thing.
• Salmon = Location/Source
  • Generally, salmon pink (#C67171) is for the thing's location or source.
• Gray = Category/Criteria/Requirements/Misc.
  • Generally, gray (#5B5B5B) is for categories, criteria, requirements, and miscellaneous labels.
    
    

Keep these colors in mind when creating new information tables. There's no need to change the colors of existing information tables. Also, when in doubt about which color to use, just don't use a color at all. It's okay.

Image Usage

Unlike other wikis, the HoboWars Help Wiki allows the inline linking of images.

This means that you can insert the URL of an image into the coding of a page and that image will render where its URL was inserted.

For example:

LOL THIS THREAD http://www.hobowars.com/wiki/images/6/63/Thread_Lag.gif CAUSES LAG OMG

LOL THIS THREAD CAUSES LAG OMG

Since we have access to inline linking, there are a few restrictions on image uploads.

• If the image can be inline linked from a HoboWars website, do not upload the image.
  • For example, if you want to put an image of a KFC Meal into a page, simply insert http://www.hobowars.com/images/items/gifs/KFC-Meal.gif into the page. Look at it this way: the image is already on the HoboWars server; why upload another one?
• Do not inline link images from other websites (except image hosting ones).
  • This is the equivalent of hotlinking; hotlinking steals the image's website's bandwidth. Now, if the inline linked image is from an image hosting site, that's fine; however, why use that image hosting site when you can upload that very same image to the HoboWars Help Wiki and do more things with it?
    
    

Now, the one downside about inline linked images is that you can't really format them. If you really need to format an image from a HoboWars website, you may upload it to the Help Wiki, but only after you have obtained permission to do so.

Spacing

If you need to force some distance between paragraphs, lists, tables, or headers, you may use <br /> (line break) tags to do so. Don't hesitate to use them, but don't use them liberally; you usually only need up to two <br /> tags to obtain the spacing distance you desire.

Horizontal Rules

Whenever you are creating an information table, if there's a table cell that doesn't have any information in it, don't just simply leave that table cell blank; use <hr style="width:75%" /> (a 75%-width horizontal rule) to fill it in.

Editing Help

Need some help with the wiki markup language? It'd be sort of redundant to post an editing guide here when Wikipedia has almost everything you need.

• General Editing Help
• Wiki Markup Cheatsheet
• Wiki Markup Help
• Table Sorting Help
• General Table Help
• Linking Help
  

Be sure to always preview your changes before you save them!

Here are a few more helpful resources for Help Wiki editors:

• Color Codes
• HTML Character Entities
  

Also, if you are new to wiki markup or HTML in general, the best thing you can do is go to any well-designed Help Wiki page and mess around with the page's coding. Be sure to only preview your changes, not save them.