Guides:Contributing

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This page is a draft and is still being written. You can help by completing it.

Contributing to this Wiki is simple, and open to anyone. You should read this Guide before making any edits to any page on this Wiki. Many resources are at your disposal on the Mediawiki help pages regarding page edition and formatting. You are also encouraged to ask for help on the Discord.

This guide is still being written. In the meantime, ask for any help on the Discord server.

Editing : What you can and can't do

If you are a player of Kerbal Powers and wishes to create a page for your nation, a character, a craft or anything else that is not directly related to the maintenance of this Wiki, go ahead ! Make sure you have read the entirety of this Guide and know the basics of wikitext formatting before starting contributing !

Basic rules

Some rules must be respected at all times. Breaking them will result in sanctions.

  • No griefing, defacing, spamming, or bulk deleting ! This is strictly forbidden and will always result in sanctions.
  • Do not post or write any kind of content that may be deemed inappropriate. All contents on this wiki must be safe for work, and must not be offensive.
  • All the rules applied on the subreddit applies here as well.

You are not allowed to edit the following pages without prior written agreement from an administrator :

  • All Category:* pages
  • All Template:* pages (unless creating a new template), and especially not the ones that are widely used.
  • All special "metapages" like CSS, Mediawiki:* pages, the frontpage, and other user's own userpages.

You are highly encouraged to :

  • Seek for help on our Discord! You are always welcome to ask, and you'd better bother a staff member for a minute than break something used on half the wiki.
  • Use categories to properly classify your articles
  • Fill up your own userpage (click your username)
  • Fix any error, typo, problem that you stumble upon and have a fix for it
  • Help building this wiki by porting and creating new templates, tidy up pages, and improve everyone's experience
  • Provide feedback on the Discord or via the pages' Discussion subpage.

Getting started

Using Categories

Categories helps users navigate around the wiki and keeps content organized. Using them wisely and thoroughly is critical for a better experience. As such a result, most pages are required to belong to a category. If no category seems to fit, you may ask for help on the Discord, or simply reference a non existing category. To add your pages to a category, simply append [[Category:<name>]] to the end of your page. For example, placing a page in the Nations category would look like this :

[[Category:Nations]]

Adding a page to mutiple categories is as simple as repeating this block for each category. For additional help on Categories, you might want to read the Mediawiki documentation about Categories.

Using Templates

Templates acts as pieces of predefined wikitext content that can be inserted into other pages to save you from writing the same markup over and over. They are a core component to most wiki pages, and offers way to ease the creation of articles and the formatting of complex data structures. Templates can also accept arguments that will be passed to them and inserted in their final output. Writing Templates is a bit more technical than plain wikitext, but still quite easy to do. If you intend to create or edit templates, you should read the documentation about Templates on Mediawiki, and have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS.

Using a template in your pages is simple. Templates are invoked by using double curly braces around their name, like this : {{myfancytemplate}}. Additional arguments may be passed, separated with pipes |. Arguments may be provided in two different ways :

  • Unnamed, ordered lists of arguments : {{myfancytemplate|arg1|arg2|...|argN}}
  • Named, unordered lists of key-value pairs : {{myfancytemplate|foo=bar|count=4|description=The quick brown Jeep jumps over the land mine.}}

For more readability, templates may be written on multiple lines, one argument at a time. For example :

{{myfancytemplate
|foo=bar
|count=4
|description=The quick brown Jeep jumps over the land mine.
}}

Templates are written into the page at loading. This allows templates to be modified and see the changes be applied on any pages that are using the template.

Example : Using {{note|This is a warning note|warn}} will invoke the Template:Note template with two unnamed arguments and will produce the following output:

This is a warning note

Nation Formatting

Naming pages

Article names are irreversible so please name nation pages in the most generic terms, eg; Republic of Orion vs Orion. A page with a government form in the title will not reflect the current state if changed.

Notable Events and History

The Nation template contains 2 sections, Notable Events and History.

History is used to briefly cover relavent events to the country, this can be made up of lore, canon events.

Notable Events is used to list reddit posts or wiki pages of events that have taken place inside of the game in a format shorter than history. These are formatted as; *Event or Post Title (year), and are a link in themselves.

Nation vs Multination

Multinations are a combination of multiple nations and AI into a larger country on the map, multinations contain regular nations that each have their own wiki page. Multination pages should only cover aspects unique to the entity and not copies of individual nation situations.