READ ME Wiki Quality Guide - The Little Things

[Andrew]

As most of you know, Wiki has a built-in quality application. We have Wiki Managers who spend a lot of time using this guide to make pages good again. While wiki quality is their primary concern, and the pages with the most errors fall into their hands. The community can help too, and it generally just takes a minute of time.

Generally during the submission process, when these errors come up we have to explain them over and over. So here is a tool for the most common errors.

Where does it tell me the quality of a page?​

At the bottom left hand of the page, there is an emoji.
The Green Happy Face is what we want, and the yellow face or red face is what we wish to avoid.


If you click on the emoji the window will expand to explain what errors are on the page.

Common Errors​

Many Links to Non-Existing Pages​

This means the article has red links in it. This means it is a broken link or a link to a wiki page that does not exist. This can be resolved by editing the link into just normal text. Approved pages should not have red links.

Incorrectly Nested Sections​

On the wiki, headlines must go in order.

Example:

======Main Headline====== This should always be at the top of the page.
=====Headline=====
====Headline====
===Headline===

The headlines always flow in order. When people skip levels is when the wiki quality management triggers. You can from a low-level heading to a high-level heading, but you cannot skip the descending headings.
An example of this error:

=====History and Background=====
===YE 30===

This skips from a headline with five = to a headline with === which is an error, and incorrect usage of headlines.

Overly Formatted Text​

We discourage the use of formatted text in articles.
Using things like ** (bold) //(italics) \\(line breaks) or ---- horizontal lines is discouraged.
If an article has too many of these things, it will trigger the error.

Why write this guide?​

Wiki Managers spend a lot of time on pages with a large number of errors because we get a quality report. However most wiki users have pages they manage such as characters, corporations, products, and factions, that may have only one or two errors. It can be a big help if you visit a page and you see a minor error to fix, fix it. It only takes a minute. If you manage something, you should fix the errors on your pages. It helps now that new submissions have to be of quality, but there are a lot of little errors across the wiki and it is a great help to the community if you take a moment, when visiting a page make sure it has that green little happy face.

If you have a stubborn error or something you can't fix - reach out.

 

[Wes]

In addition to quality of pages, we also have a Style Guide that says what we want wiki pages to look like. I'm not going to repeat everything here, but the key things are:

1. After section headers there should be some text.
2. Things in bullet points should be very short. Don't jam a whole paragraph into a bullet point.
3. If there's a relevant template, please use that so pages of a common type share a common layout.
   • Typically it's Title (and overview), History, Description, Usage, OOC Notes.

What would also help us out a lot is:

1. If you make a page, make sure there's other pages that link to it (orphan pages may be deleted).
2. Try not to make too many broken links (red links) in one page.
3. When you make a page it's got to have some sort of content (if it's just an empty template, we'll delete it).
4. Put all unapproved/work-in-progress articles in wip: namespace. WIPs outside of WIP: may be deleted.

Thanks everyone!