Wiki Editor Advice

To begin, I’m not an expert on accessibility in any way. But I do care about it, and I consider accessibility to be one of the core goals that must be considered in any public project.

• 1 Why accessibility?
• 2 Accessibility and the ’net
• 3 Visual considerations
• 4 Further reading
• 5 Notes

Here are some examples of accessibility features that can be found in everyday life:

• A wide door with automatic or semi-automatic opener and a low step. Great for wheelchair users, parents with strollers, or just someone carrying lots of luggage onto the bus.
• Automatic voice announcements on upcoming stops for the bus or train. Great for blind people, new visitors, or when it’s dark outside.
• Well-structured information. Great for people with cognitive issues or people who a…

You read the blog "I have added some content, what is next?" and you want more advanced advices? This is the right place! We are going to see some best practices for articles and how to use the source editor for adding and editing an infobox.

As an admin, particularly as a founder, you want to make sure your wiki has good and useful templates. In this blog post, we are going to see some basics about templates - and it's absolutely worth it, we promise!

Have you ever seen the word 'Template' but never understood what it meant? Or someone told you 'create a template page' and you had no clue? This guide is for you to figure things out! Lucy is on the line, buckle up.

What are templates?

Templates are a special way to store data on your wiki. It is a way to tell Fandom 'hey, can you please keep all this huge scary code for me here, and I will decide what to do with it later?' You create a big and spooky layout once, and next time you need it, you won't have to write it all over again, Fandom will remember it for you.

How do I create a template page?

A template page is created the same way as any other page on your wiki. You can press 'Add new page' on the drop-down menu on top, or you can type…

Oh, the scary word 'infobox' that everyone seems to be using when you have no clue what it is! How do we create, style and use infoboxes? Tldr: it's not easy. Expanded explanation: keep reading further, Lucy is on the line!

• 1 Building
  • 1.1 What is an infobox?
  • 1.2 Types of infoboxes
  • 1.3 Portable Infobox: Infobox builder
  • 1.4 Portable Infobox: How do I understand what is going on?
    • 1.4.1 Weird symbols

Yes, that is exactly what you have seen on all these cool fancy wikis! Infoboxes are rectangles located on the right side of a page that contain brief information about a character, an item, a game and so on. They are meant to give a gist of the topic without going into details and provide the most basic factual data. They usually include the name, a picture and…

Are you a new editor who has just joined and has no idea what to do? Or are you an older editor who does not feel comfortable with switching between the Visual Editor and Source Editor? Or maybe you have always used only VE (the Visual Editor) and you keep hearing from more experienced Fandom members that SE (the Source Editor) is a blessing? Here is how you can learn to use both! Buckle up, Lucy is on the line!

The very basics of Fandom

So, you are new here, you feel scared and excited but also clueless about how everything works. Let us start from the beginning.

What do we do here on Fandom?

Our main task, as editors, is to provide content for readers in the most easily accessible way. Simply speaking: you write, they read. We have a big num…

This is time to talk about advanced wiki editing. Have you ever thought about doing more than what Fandom offers by default?

The answer to this question is quite simple: source editing is the plain html markup with no pre-designed tools (except for some life-saving mediawiki symbols). The amount of customization possibilities it provides is just enormous, therefore using the visual editor instead strips you of all custom colors, layouts, sizes and more. The source editor is your best friend when it comes to editing a wiki.

To make your life easier, enable syntax highlighting in your source editor. This feature makes your code colorful which lets you distinguish between html tags vs. plain text vs. templates vs. tables. For that you need to f…

It can be a daunting task to write a new page. Even more so to start a new wiki from scratch or reviving a dead wiki. This is a rather personal view of how to go about it, grounded in the idea that wikis should be collaborative and ongoing ventures. It is not necessarily the end-all and be-all for building a wiki, but it is hopefully a reasonable way to go about it. If nothing else, I hope it will help the reader to create their own approach to building up a wiki.

• 1 Write text
• 2 Make links
• 3 Build in a spiral
• 4 The value of imperfect pages
• 5 One object, one page
• 6 Less is more
• 7 Style guides should be guides

Wikis are a textual medium. Images, videos, and sounds have their place and can play great roles, but they are all supplementary to the text. Text i…

This is a continuation of my earlier article Write Text, Make Links, discussing how a style guide or manual of style fits into a wiki as a collaborative and ongoing venture. It is not a finished example that can be adapted to an individual wiki, rather an attempt to provide tools to reason about and evaluate a style guide, and how to decide what to include.

Note: You might see different terms used on different wikis, like Manual of Style, Style Guide, Layout Guide, or something else. I use the term style guide here, but as used here there is no real conceptual difference between the terms.

• 1 Rules versus guides
• 2 A style guide is explored
• 3 Standardisation
• 4 Documentation
• 5 Prescription
• 6 Good writing cannot be standardised
• 7 Examples

Wiki rules and style…

Welcome back everyone for our second Fandom Star interview. This time, I had the great pleasure to be joined by my friend and noted help guide enthusiast LucyKuranSKYDOME to discuss her rather hectic start on Fandom, fight over style versus substance on a wiki, and ponder over whether she will ever put on her dancing shoes again.

Read on and enjoy!

HammerOfThor: Can you give a brief introduction of yourself and the wikis you are active on

LucyKuran: Hello, I am Lucy, I am an active Fandom Discord helper now known as 'Lucy Married to Fandom' there, and I am a wiki lover who specializes in building smaller wikis alone from scratch. My main wiki at the moment is Disney Speedstorm Wiki (EN/ES/RU), but I am also the main contributor of Skydome Wik…