Help:Editing

So you want to help with editing the wiki to keep it up to date or add more information. Perfect! The Towns community really appreciates it.

All editing requires a user account (to help keep down spam). Take a moment to register and then start editing away!

The areas that need the most attention are on the To Do list.

Or if you find yourself looking for a page that doesn't exist, and you lack the expertise/knowledge to make one yourself, create a blank page and add it to this category: Category:Requested Pages, and an editor will get around to creating a page eventually.

Basic Editing
For information on basic editing, including basic text edits like bold and italic, links, sections, and much, much more, please check out the basic Editing article at wikimedia: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting

Images are also a big part of this Wiki and tutorials can be found here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Images

If you are unsure, you can check existing articles in this wiki for an example or ask me anytime.

If you're interested and you feel like tackling some of the more advanced features in wiki editing like redirects, categories, templates and tables, check out http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Editing and choose an article from the list.

Towns Wiki standards
When editing or creating pages please try and use the following guidelines as uniformity really helps users find and understand information.

Making multiple edits to a single page
If you are changing a lot on a single page (eg, creating a new page, updating the main page with new links/formatting, etc), use the Show preview function shown under the edit window, or the Preview tab shown above the edit window. This will show you a preview of the page including all the changes you have made - allowing you to see if they work BEFORE you submit. Only submit the page once you are completely happy with it - this will help keep clutter down on the Special:RecentChanges page.

Include summaries in edits
When editing, pay attention to the Summary: box located under the edit window. Including a summary in this box each time you edit can prove incredibly useful to other editors - they can see at a glance the kind of edit you did to a page. Some examples of good summaries are:
 * Added image/removed stub template
 * Fixed typos
 * Added section on weretigers

Some examples of bad summaries are:
 * edited page
 * added info
 * did some stuff

Try to be descriptive with your summaries.

Resources
The game files are a great place to find accurate information regarding many of the ingame items and entities, but it takes some getting used to, to be able to draw out useful information.
 * The "*.xml" files in Towns\data is a good place to find statistics.
 * The images in Towns\data\graphics is a good place to find high quality images of everything. Note that some items have a color filter on them so in-game images must be taken.
 * The "graphics.ini" file in Towns\ shows what item corresponds to which part of which image file. It also indicates what color filter is used.

Adding references, citations or quotes from the forum
When adding a quote from the official towns forum (http://www.townsgame.com/forums) try and make sure you cite who said it, date, if it effects a specific version, and a link to a the forum in a reference.

You can add a reference by doing the following: "However, it has been confirmed on the forums that this will be changed in a later update. "

Which will show up like this:

"However, it has been confirmed on the forums that this will be changed in a later update. "

Once that is done you need to make sure at the bottom of the page to include a tag so that the references appear: Which will show up like this:

Useful templates

 * Template:Food
 * Template:Living Entity
 * Template:Weapon
 * Template:Rweapon
 * Category:Templates
 * Category:Maintenance_Templates

Adding Video from YouTube
Embed video has been installed. You can see documentation for it at: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EmbedVideo#Usage