Contributor Guide

From Videogame Interface Wiki

Pages

Typical Page

A typical page on this wiki starts with an infobox which usually has an image of what the page is about, and some useful information. Most of this information also appears in the form of categories at the end of the page. When looking at the code for a page these are probably the two most confusing sections at first. When you start editing you may want to leave these out until you are more comfortable with Mediawiki syntax. You don't have to feel guilty or anything about that, its' a wiki, the point is that we can all create pages together.

The rest of the page should be fairly easy to read.


User Pages

Attached to your account there is a page that only you can edit, called a User Page. You may like to use this to introduce yourself, list pronouns, outline contact boundaries, etc. You can get to it via:

  • The menu to the right of the search bar,
  • This special link: Special:MyPage,
  • Putting the URL https://videogameinterface.wiki/index.php/User:[username] (where [username] is replaced by your username) into your browser.

You can also create Subpages, which you can use for things like drafts, experimenting with wiki syntax, or more permanent things like pages related to the contents of the wiki but with a personal bent.

Rjt adds: For example I have a scrappy page for my controller collection User:Rjt/Collection, and one for collecting info. about the Pro Controller naming convention.

User Pages also have Talk Pages attached to them. You can use these to publicly

Subpages

Subpages are extra pages attached/related to a specific page. Practically they're not much different to a regular page, though they do link back to their parent; they're more of an organisational tool.

They can be useful for:

To indicate that something is a subpage you use a forward slash (/) in its link. For example, a subpage of this one could be linked to with [[/subpage]], and would be accessible at [[https://videogameinterface.wiki/index.php?title=Contributor_Guide/subpage]].

See Also

Talk Pages

Talk Pages are for discussing the articles they are attached too. For example you may want to get feedback on an edit before you make it, talk about an issue with information on the page, propose an idea for how things could be organised better, etc. If there's something you'd like to see explained on this page you could mention in on this page's talk page, for example.

You get to them via the 'Discussion' link near the top of each page.

The Talk page on the main page of the wiki can be used for more general discussions about the wiki.

There are also Talk Pages on User Pages that you can use to talk with wiki members.

The Help:Talk_pages entry on the Mediawiki Wiki has a good guide to conventions.

Syntax

Infoboxes

Tables

Making tables can get pretty messy, Mediawiki has particularly weird syntax. You may find it helpful to start with a table generator like this one browser-based one: Tables Generator, which even let's you do fancy stuff like merge cells.

Some examples of tables on this wiki:

  • Mahjong - Has advanced features like captions, templates, and borderless cells.
  • Sega Saturn Twin-Stick - Makes use of borderless cells to create an irregularly shaped table, and has few instances of colspan.

Fun with tables:

  • Adding class="sortable" will make it so people can click the table headers to sort the table rows alphabetically. As you'd usually also add the 'wikitable' class this would look like this: class="wikitable sortable"
  • You can use style="" like you would with inline CSS. You can put multiple rules in here by separating them with semicolons, eg: style="color:red; text-align:center"
    • style="background-color:unset" will remove the background colour of a cell, which you may find useful for headings. Instead of unset you can put colour names of hex values here.
    • style="border:none" will remove the borders of a cell. Other cells that are touching will keep their borders, so it's a nice trick to make empty cells disappear and create a non-square shaped table like on the Sega Saturn Twin-Stick page. This, combined with removing the background colour, is used for the subheadings like 'Arcade panels' on the Mahjong page, which means it can remain as one table all the cells aligned, but can still have a bit of separation.
    • style="text-align:center" will align text to the centre of a cell. You can also use left and right.
    • style="vertical-align:top" will align a cell's contents to the top. Can be handy in combination with rowspan.
  • You can use colspan and rowspan to make a cell span multiple columns and rows:

Here's an example with col/rowspan (it's also placed in a table so I can annotate it on the right :3— rjt (talk)):

Code Explanation Output 
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! colspan="2" | Header 1AB
! Header 1C
|-
| Cell 2A
| Cell 2B
| rowspan="2" style="vertical-align:top" | Cell 23C
|-
| Cell 3A
| Cell 3B
|}
The class wikitable will do a bunch of things like add outlines. Usually you would add this.

The exclamation mark marks a cell as a header. Note how the colspan information is added: It has to be separated from the cell content with another vertical bar character. This is the same for style info.

But note that when you include multiple types of formatting information they don't all need to be separated.

Header 1AB Header 1C
Cell 2A Cell 2B Cell 23C
Cell 3A Cell 3B

In this example each cell is on it's own line, but you may find it easier to read (especially for small tables) to put multiple cells on a single line, like this: 

{| class="wikitable" 
|-
! colspan="2" | Header 1AB !! Header 1C
|-
| Cell 2A || Cell 2B || rowspan="2" style="vertical-align:top" | Cell 23C
|-
| Cell 3A || Cell 3B
|}

There are also some Templates for use in tables...

Templates

Templates are generally little shortcuts you can use for complex or tedious syntax.

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