Wiki usage notes

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This article intends to give an idea of how to get the most out of this wiki site.

Write!

The success of a site like this depends on its contributors. If you see a mistake, no matter how small, edit the article and fix it. If you know that something is missing, please write about it, and if you don't know enough put something in the article reminding others to add this information.

Discussion pages

Each article has a discussion page. Use this page to ask questions or suggest changes to a page. For instance, if you're not sure if something is right or not, and want to make sure before editing yourself, the discussion page is ideal. Likewise if there is something missing from a page that you don't know much about, the discussion page is a good place to put in the request. Don't hesitate to use these, and don't forget to sign your username.

New articles

If you'd like to create a new article and aren't sure where to put it, just give it a general name. We can always move or reorganize pages later. It's better to get the information down and worry about the details later.

When adding a new article, put something in the notes telling where you got the information (for instance if you copied it from somewhere else).

Editing articles

When possible, edit only the section that you'd like to change, rather than the whole article. This makes it less likely for two authors to be editing the same page at the same time. This also makes changes more atomic, and the section name is automatically added to the article editing summary, which makes it easier to see what part of the article was changed.

On the topic of summaries, please try to remember to add a summary whenever editing an article. It is somewhat annoying to have to check the diffs every time someone makes an edit. Just a few words will do, like "fixed spelling of 'pulchritudinous'" or "restructured for better flow".

To help keep the notes simple, its best to also keep the edits simple. Don't try to totally rewrite an article in one edit, unless it's very short. If there's a logical way to break up the edits do so.

General tips

Notes

If there's something you'd like to draw the reader's attention to, you can use the note template. Here's an example of how to use it:

{{note|Notes are hard to miss}}

This is what it will look like:

Note: Notes are hard to miss.

Sections

Articles can be split into sections with sub-sections. The wiki generates a nice table of contents by the sections. To make a top-level section, put the section name between a set of double equal signs, like this:

==Overview==

A section of this would have one more equal sign on each side:

===Sub-section 1===

There may be sub-sub sections, and sub-sub-sub sections, and so on. Don't get too carried away...

Links

The wiki generates links automatically in many cases. To link to something on an external site, use single brackets, with the URL first, followed by the link text, like this:

[http://vdrift.net/ VDrift]

To put a raw URL in an article, simply insert it without any brackets, it will automatically be turned into a link. To make internal links, simply put the page's name in double square brackets. You don't have to put in any underscores as are added to the URL of the page. Here's a link to this page:

[[Wiki usage notes]]

To give a link of this nature a different link text, add a pipe character ("|") after the page name, and then put the link text:

[[Wiki usage notes|Notes on using the wiki]]

Unwritten pages

If there's a topic that really deserves its own article, but there is no information on the wiki about it yet, just add a link to the article where it should go. This will encourage others to write the page.

We really need a [[Car modeling tutorial]].

Code blocks

The wiki makes it very simple to add blocks of pre-formatted text. Simply add a space before the lines which should be part of the code block.

Talking about files

When referencing file or directory names, it is important to set them apart from the other text so that the reader doesn't confuse sentence punctuation and other words with the directory or file name. The best way to address this is to make the text bold, by adding three apostrophes before and after the text:

VDrift's main menu in the simple skin is '''data/skins/simple/menus/Main'''.

Nevertheless

If you feel like you don't understand the above guidelines, don't worry about them too much. Go ahead and write your article or fix another, someone will probably clean it up later if there are mistakes or areas for improvement.