Help:Basic Editing Guide

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Contents	Beginner's guide	Navigation	Style guide
Formatting	Links	Images	Tables

Thank you for taking the time to consider contributing to the wiki. This guide - along with others that you can navigate to from the top of this page - is designed for all users, even wiki maintainers. Directly below this text is a preface to editing so that you're prepared to do the rest without worry. IMPORTANT: To submit changes for review, you need to log in to the wiki. Do not create a new account. Instead, click "log in" and input your forum username and password in the appropriate boxes. They are linked.

Foreword About Additions and Approval

Any logged in user can submit changes to nearly any page, but those changes will not be merged unless a wiki maintainer reviews and approves of the changes or you are a maintainer/lore writer yourself. All wiki maintainers are given a large and obvious notification on any wiki page whenever there are submissions that await approval. Be sure to review the style guide before making large edits to make sure your page is nice and clean. In any case if you have questions or concerns about the wiki or your edits then feel free to contact a maintainer on the discord.

Criteria for Edits

The rules of editing are simple, and should ideally match one of a select few criteria, or be otherwise sensible. Your edits will be considered but have a drastically lower chance of acceptance if it does not. Lore pages are not exempt from corrections at this moment, but are much more limited in scope. Submitting any edit to a lore page will require lore approval, regardless of the nature of the edit - ideally this permission is obtained before you make your edits.

Here is the general criteria of editing on the wiki:

1. It corrects an error, or otherwise serves to correct a problem.
2. It adds additional information to improve the page.
3. It removes unnecessary clutter.
4. It rephrases the text to be more clear or user friendly.

An edit that achieves one or more of these criteria is much more likely to be accepted. However, if the change is sensible and it doesn't fit them, it will still be considered but may require wiki maintainer input or alterations.

Criteria for Page Creation

Creating a brand new page is also encouraged, however, you must understand that the criteria is much more strict than a simple edit, the edit criteria is counted as well in these, and it's limited to gameplay mechanics at this moment.

Here is the general criteria of adding a new page to the wiki:

1. It serves an obvious purpose, not filled adequately by any other page.
2. It is deemed by the wiki maintainer team to be a quality addition, on discussion.

Your Wiki/Forum Account

Aurora station utilizes a cross platform system that enables you to use the same account between the forum and the wiki. You will need to log onto the wiki through your forum account. To register a wiki account, you must first register a forum account. You can do that at this link. If you have trouble logging onto the wiki and have spaces in your username then you should contact staff.

Editing

Once you've logged in and found an error on the Wiki, click 'Edit' at the top to begin the simple process of correcting it. The button should look like this, and you must be on the page you wish to edit:

Once you click that edit button, you should be brought to a the wiki parser containing everything that renders the page you're working on. Ctrl-F to the error or scroll down to it and begin your edits. At the bottom where it says 'Watch this page' you should type a summary. If the edits you made were relatively minor (fixing typos, formatting, etc) then you can click the 'This is a minor edit' button. It should look similar to this:

Before submitting your changes, always preview your work to make sure your changes haven't accidentally messed something up. You may even catch some other issues that you missed at first glance. Anyway, when you're sure you're done with your edits and want to submit them, click 'Save changes' to queue the submission up for approval, after which it's just a matter of waiting for wiki maintainer input. You should see this if all went well:

Formatting

See also: The Guide to Formatting
Mediawiki has some bits and bobs to stylize your text, which can aid in readability if used properly. Be sure to take a look at the style guide for info on how these tools may best be used. Regardless, the following table provides examples on some of the most common formatting:

Example Wikitext

What you type	What it looks like
''italic text''	italic text
'''bold text'''	bold text
<small>small text</small>	small text
no indent :single indent ::double indent :::triple indent	no indent single indent double indent triple indent
#Entry 1 #Entry 2 #Entry 3 ##Entry 3 subtype 1	Entry 1 Entry 2 Entry 3 Entry 3 subtype 1
*Bullet 1 *Bullet 2 *Bullet 3 **Bullet 3 subtype 1 *#Bullet 3 number 1	Bullet 1 Bullet 2 Bullet 3 Bullet 3 subtype 1 Bullet 3 number 1
=Heading Level 1= ==Heading Level 2== ===Heading Level 3=== ====Heading Level 4====	Heading Level 1 Heading Level 2 Heading Level 3 Heading Level 4

Linking

See also: The Guide to Links
You're probably already familiar with links if you've managed to reach this guide. It's the blue text you often see around wiki pages, and it usually looks like this. Your first inclination when adding inter-wiki links is probably to just paste the URL and be done with it, but the ideal method is actually way easier. Below you'll find a table that explains how to properly add links to the page you're working on:

Example Links

	What you type	What it looks like	What it's for
1	[[Assistant]]	Assistant	This is the standard inter-wiki link. If you want to link to another page on the wiki, then use this.
2	[[Assistant|Dirty maintenance gremlins]]	Dirty maintenance gremlins	Adding a | (known as a vertical bar) between the page name and some text will render that link as the text you put in, in case you want to hide a link inside some relevant information. You may discover that this very guide uses this method in more than a few areas!
3	[[Guide to EVA#Jetpacks|How to use Jetpacks]]	How to use Jetpacks	Sometimes only a specific part of a page is relevant to what you're typing about, so in this case we link to the page and the relevant subheading. Anything that appears in the table of contents (or is otherwise "anchored") can be linked to this way.
4	[[#Editing|The Editing subheading]]	The Editing subheading	If you want to link to a subheading that's already on the page you're editing, you can forego having to include the name of the page and only include the subheading name.
5	[[wikipedia:Space Station 13|Wikipedia Article about SS13]]	Wikipedia Article about SS13	This simply links back to Wikipedia. You probably won't be using this much since Aurora's setting is purely fictional, but this is here for posterity.
6	[https://forums.aurorastation.org/topic/7780-looking-for-wiki-developers/#comment-153366 Burrito's cry for help]	Burrito's cry for help	If you must link to something outside of the wiki then this is what you'd use. Note that there is nothing separating the URL from the rendered text except for a space, and that the entire link is surrounded by single brackets, not double. Please do not link to unrelated or malicious websites - this feature is mostly reserved for linking to Aurora-related websites like the forums.

Images

See also: The Guide to Images
Images are just that: images. On the wiki they're media that's rendered in pretty ways on the page and - hopefully - breaks up the flow of information to make the page more digestible to the viewer. To upload a file, do the following:

1. Click the Upload file button on the left of your screen
   OR
   Click on a red link to the file of your choosing.
2. Click Choose file to select what file to upload from your PC.
   • Ideally this is in a common image format (JPG, PNG, GIF, etc).
3. Give the file a name, ideally relevant to what the file is about.
   • If you went with the red link method then the filename is probably already populated.
4. Give it a summary if you want.
5. Click Upload file to finish.

That should do it, as long as there are no errors (most common being duplicate images). Note that due to how caching works that it may take a while for your file to actually render on pages it's used.

Please note: If you are uploading sprites from the game, ensure that their dimensions are 32x32 (or whatever their original resolution is). If you want to scale a sprite up, do it through the wiki, not an image editor (see below). Ideally all sprites are retrieved from the game's files and not from screenshots. See the images guide for a how-to on getting the best possible sprites.

Various ways to link a file

What you type	What it looks like	Explanation
[[File:Btoolbox.png]]		This is the simplest way to display an image. These will typically default to the left side of the page.
[[File:Btoolbox.png|64px]]		By using 64px (or any other number, ideally multiples of 32 if it's a sprite) you can scale an image via the wiki.
[[File:Btoolbox.png|64px|center]]		You can use center to put an image directly in the center of the page. There are other directions you can use as well, like right.
[[File:Btoolbox.png|link=Help:Contents|I AM VERY LOUD LOOKING TEXT]]		The first part transforms the image into a link to another page. Normally this would link back to the image itself. The second part adds a caption to images that is only visible if you hover your cursor over it, which can be useful for additional-but-not-useful info about an item.
[[File:Btoolbox.png|link=|This image goes no where]]		By setting the link to an empty value you can make the image do nothing if it's clicked on.
[[File:Btoolbox.png|thumb|Caption!]]	Caption!	If you want information related to an image to be readily visible then you can use the thumb parameter, followed by the info you'd like to type. Thumbs will default to the right side of the page.

Page Creation

Remember: Only create a new page if the content you're writing about is no where else on the wiki and doesn't belong on an existing page, or if adding information to existing entries would detract from the page that it exists on.

Creating a page is as simple as looking up a missing page and clicking on the red link:

After that, you'll get a wiki parser similar to what you'd see when editing another page, except this time it's completely empty. This is perhaps a bit daunting at first, but if what you're writing about is similar to another page then you can probably use most of its content here (ex. you're writing about a new job, there are lots of other standalone job pages that you can draw resources from). If you're still working on it, or don't think you can finish the page, then you can throw a {{Wip}} template at the top to say that the page is a work in progress, after which it's added to the WIP category for tracking.

Either way, once you're done writing and stylizing everything you can hit Save page at the bottom along with a summary of what the page is about.

After that, this should probably appear, followed by either approval or denial from wiki maintainers: