Wiki Tips

This is basically a scratch page for Wiki editors to share helpful tips with each other. It could be anything from general writing tips to help with layout styling and figuring out how Wagn's card system works. Add anything that you think might be useful and post any questions you have to the discussion section!

 

Appearance

  • Wikipedia has a good set of guidelines for placing images within articles. This includes where images should generally placed horizontally (left vs right aligned) and vertically (with respect to sections and paragraphs of text).
  • Use your judgement on including cards in their closed, open, titled, or content views. For example the cards for each season contain additional cards for each episode. As each episode has a lot of content inside it, it makes sense to present these cards in a "closed" view instead of having all the episodes open and creating a massively long page that has every single episode open. If a page starts to look too long, try closing some of the cards to see if it looks better.

 

Content tips

  • Make sure content is simple to read and high in facts. Avoid flowery language, complex language, and hype. (1)
  • Use the minimum amount of text that is needed. Users are looking to pick out the important information. (1)
  • Make it easy for users to find information quickly. Although this may lead to a user spending less time reading a page, it makes it more likely that they will return to the site if they don't feel like their time was wasted. (1)
  • Each element should have a clear purpose and bring value to the page. Make sure photos and graphics are for explanation and not purely for decoration. (1)
  • If you mention or link to an episode, try to include the season and episode number as it is easier to see where the episode fits - in terms of order and position within the series - than the name alone.

Grammar

  • Things like Alpha Pack and True Alpha are proper nouns as they describe the name of a specific thing. These should always be capitalized.
  • On the other hand, alpha, beta, omega, werewolf, wolf, pack, etc are common nouns and should not be capitalized unless they start a sentence.
  • Don't get tripped up by "The Alpha" from season 1, "The Kanima" from season 2, and "The Darach" from season 3! Although normally alpha, kanima, and darach are common nouns that shouldn't be capitalized, these are used as titles for specific people whose identities were unknown at the time.

Wagn Cards

  • Create links using double square brackets like this [[card name or external URL goes here]]. To create internal links you only need to insert the card name. For external links, insert the full URL. To customize the text displayed for the link, use the pipe character (shift + \ = | ) like this [[card name or URL|custom link text]]. Note that card links default to using the name of the card as typed, so typing the card name twice in a row like this [[card name|card name]] is unnecessary. Also, links are not case sensitive. [[Werewolf]] works just as well as [[werewolf]]. See more at http://wagn.org/link_syntax.
  • When linking to other cards within the text of a page, like this, only link the first occurrence of the thing you are linking to (character, lore, creature, season, etc). There are two (current) exceptions to this. 1) Linking directly to an episode when referring to specific scenes/incidents. 2) Linking to the same page under multiple different names or making a vague reference to a person/thing that is identified only by the link, such as Peter Hale and the Alpha. In this case only link once per name used.

 


 (1) User Experience Fundamentals for Web Design on Lynda.com