Mostly Harmless
Legacy:Guidelines On Page Creation
Contents
Starting a page[edit]
Creating a new page is easy and you don't need a huge amount of material to begin, but do a search to see if the topic is already covered somewhere else.
Here's what Wikipedia has to say on starting new pages:
- If you like, you can enter just a line or two of text for an entry. It's a start. Full-blown articles are not required. Adding any (accurate, helpful) information is welcome! Of course, if you can write more, that's all the better.
- How you word your articles will determine, to some extent, how likely it is other people will work on it. Examples:
- An article that leaves many intriguing-sounding links or leaves ellipses (...), etc., might invite other know-it-alls to fill in the blanks.
- Straightforward requests for information in an article can lead to good articles.
Page Names[edit]
Use Singular Names[edit]
Pages with singular names are easier to link to than plural names. For example:
Foo is a Global Function.
Foo and bar are both Global Functions.
"How To" Pages[edit]
Try to give titles that can easily be linked within the flow of page text. For example, "Create a skybox" is easier to link to than "Creating a skybox":
We'll need a place for the lightning, so create a skybox and...
See Category:Legacy Basic Procedure for more on this naming scheme.
Topic Hubs[edit]
Tarquin: some of these are called "Topics on foo", some are "Foo topics" and some are just, eg, Lighting. Do we need to standardize and how?
SuperApe: I'd say yes for main categories like Mapping, Modding and Modeling. However, it could get out of hand if we started to redo subtopic pages as well. It's probably not critical. "Topics on foo" sounds better than the others. We could simply identify those topic hub pages and transfer the text into the new page. Then, we'd have to go through all the backlinks to the old hub. A little tedious, perhaps.
Topic Hub Pages[edit]
- Topics On Mapping
- Topics On Modeling
- Topics On Animation
- Topics On Modding
- Topics On Scripting
- Topics On UnrealWiki Use
Tarquin: It doesn't have to be tedious. Ask an admin to rename pages. All links are updated :)
SuperApe: The previous list was a suggested list. What do we think of them? :)
Tarquin: Looks good. Though Animation, not Animating. scripting is fine.
SuperApe: I thought Scripting was good, then I thought "UScripting" might be more specific. Animation it is. Any other good Main topic hub page ideas? Edit: Check out this old page: Topics.
Subtopic Names[edit]
When you're describing a subtopic of a larger topic, make that page a subpage by linking to it as MainPage/SubPage (or just /SubPage on the MainPage itself). That'll provide an extra link to the main page on all sub pages, and it helps to keep the articles structured. For instance, if you add a page describing techniques using MeshMaker, call that page MeshMaker/Techniques. One major benefit of this type of organization is that search results are displayed with their topic/sub-topic relationships apparent (for example, search on the keyword 'Actor' and see how sub-topics of Actor are indented under the main topic.
However, it's best to only do this when the subtopic won't need to be linked from elsewhere.
See also:
- subtopic discussion
- UseModWiki on using subpages: UseMod:SubPage.
Page Links[edit]
In brief: once you have created a page, go forth and find places to link to it. Put relevant links on the page too. Guidelines on Page Links has more suggestions on this.
Refactoring[edit]
Redirect Pages[edit]
Consider the benefits of creating redirect pages for any alternative wordings of the topic you've created. If you do this, you reduce the potential of someone creating a page concerning the same topic but unaware that your page exists.
