New Contributors Quick Start

This page should be a quick and easy guide to contributing to the UnrealWiki. Ideally, it should give a newcomer enough information to get started right away. If it doesn't, change it! Feel free to visit the [Unreal Wiki forum] if you have questions, or irc://irc.enterthegame.com/unrealwiki

Quick Start

Background

You might want to read Project FAQ or Project Aims for info on the site.

Registration (optional)

Go to [Preferences] and give yourself a username and password. This is so your name appears on the Recent Changes list; nothing else (you don't even need an email address). The Category Personal Page page has a list of all people who have contributed to the wiki; you can also add your name to this list if you like.

Exploring

Browse around the site. If you find a page you'd like to add something to, click the Edit text of this page link at the bottom of the page. This will load up a form containing the text of the page. Make additions or corrections and press Save.

Editing Pages

When editing there is a link to the markup syntax. Use Preview to check your formatting. Wiki has its own markup, but it's very very simple and you can pick it up by following what's on a page so far. The reference page is Wiki Markup.

You can use the Sandbox page if you just want to practise editing and markup. You can also see examples of markup on there.

That said, don't worry too much if you make markup errors on a page – someone else is bound to come along and correct them.

Note that the Home Page is read-only to avoid people making practice edits on it.

Adding New Material

You can edit existing pages to add information or ideas, fix mistakes, or create links to other relevant pages on the wiki or elsewhere. Before adding new material, make sure it is actually new to the wiki by doing a thorough Search for the topic. If you're unsure of what name to give a new page, or you want to add something small but aren't sure where, add it to the Inbox, or to your own page (you will see that when you register).

If you spot an inaccuracy, it's much better to correct it than to simply make a note about it. However, do not use guesswork to correct information, do a little bit of research or an experiment to confirm what you are going to write. If you know something is wrong but do not know the right answer, it's better to do it as a note after all.

Creating Pages

To add a new page, first find somewhere to link from – somewhere like Mapping Lessons or UnrealEd Tips for example. Edit that page, and in a suitable place write the title of the page you want to add, surrounded by double square brackets like this:
[[name of your new page]]
Press Save. The page will reload. The new text will be rendered with a ? link after it – this means it's a link to page that doesn't exist yet. Clicking the link will take you to the edit form for this new page. Write some text, press save, and the new page is created.
Please don't start new pages by just typing in a URL into your browser. Pages created like this won't be linked to anything else in the wiki (hence they're called orphans). The idea is to build a web. Find somewhere to link from first.

Many class pages are missing from this website. This Wiki community would appreciate it greatly if you helped add them. It's pretty easy to create a class page, and you of course do not have to complete it, but can leave much of it blank for other people to start. People will be much more likely to edit and add to a class page that already exists then to create a new one. To see a template for creating a class page, see the
Class Wikifier

Note that admins can rename pages: if you create a page and then it vanishes, this is probably what has happened. Find the link you made for it or look on Recent Changes: the page name will have been updated there too. More: Guidelines On Tutorials.

Making Rough Starts

You don't need to write an entire article for a new page. It's fine to just make a start on something, or write what you know. If you write a partial article, it can be a good idea to list things you think the article should eventually cover: You can come back to it later, and in the meantime someone else may have made additions to the page.

It's best to start with content rather than structure though. If you end up creating many pages of headings with no actual information in them it makes it harder for everyone to find useful information on the wiki.

Don't submit material that is copyrighted...

...unless you have express permission. If you own the copyright (ie if you wrote it yourself), then obviously it's fine. If you already have tutes on the web you are very welcome to add your technological and cultural distinctiveness to our own.

Use existing resources

and don't reinvent the wheel. Most simple tasks are explained on Basic Procedure pages: you can link to those from tutorials.

Content Ownership

The content submitted to the wiki does not belong to the author. It is not the personal property of anyone, but rather the "ownership" belongs to all wiki users. As a wiki, it's content is subject to change by any other wiki user. Hopefully this change is for the better, as it usually is. But, please do not take personal offense to edits on a page you've created. The edits or changes made were most likely made in the spirit of making the wiki better; more inclusive, more reference-like, more generalized, more linkable, more useful. If you have a question or comment about the changes made, make your thoughts heard in the Discussion section at the bottom of the page.

Community

(brief notes...) Checking Recent Changes is part of the responsibilities of being a good Wikizen:

check for vandalism,
see what other people have written and help out if you can,
check if you have messages,
check what people have been doing on pages you've worked on recently

If you've got a minute to spare, take a look at UnrealWiki To Do

What Next?

You can create a personal page for yourself, and get a smug sense of satisfaction at the increasing number of people who are working together on the project.
Recent Changes is the nerve center of the site. It's what the hive mind is currently thinking about. It's also rather a large page, so you may want to change the number of displayed days in your Preferences. It's also where important news about the site is posted.

Discussion

Dr.AwkwArD: Since I have no idea where to ask general proceedural questions and I'm a "new contributor", I'll just do it here. Is there a convenient (or even painful, i suppose) way to generate a list of pages that link to a specific page?

Sweavo: you can click on the Actor title on the actor page for backlinks.

Foxpaw: Not sure if it's really convention to have a "UT2003" version of the pages.. I believe the convention we've been using is, the straight name refers to the most recent incarnation of the engine, or the engine for which the most recent information is availible. So I wouldn't think we should move Actor to Actor (UT2003) until the next generation Unreal Engine comes out. Though, if there's stuff changed in UT2004, that can be indicated on the page. I don't think that a new page should be created for UT2004 though, if that's what you were thinking.

Anyways, that's just my two cents. In response to your question, it's quite simple. The search searches the text contents of the files that make the wiki pages, not formatted data. So, searching for [[Actor]] will find all pages that link to actor. Except piped ones, which I guess you might be able to find with |Actor]] or something.

I'll warn you though, there's a lot of pages that reference Actor.

SuperApe: Having just been told by Tarquin to not use definition lists for anything but definitions, I find myself having to reformat this page. After all, this is the one of the first places new people would look for proper formatting, yes? Edit.

Dr.AwkwArD: Foxpaw → <rant> Though present convention may be to use the unembellished name to refer to the most current version of the tech available, I feel rather strongly that it leads to confusion and that we really require a paradigm shift here. How many pages using "just the name" are actually for the most current game/engine/build? How many are not? Loads on both sides, right? If we begin to associate each section/page/link with the game/engine/build for which it is valid at the time of creation, then the effectiveness of the info will be increased (IMHO); plus, we won't have as much to clean up later (as we do right now... like figuring out if a page is refering to UT, UT2003,or what and then relabeling it). As a user of this resource, I've been burned by this very problem several times–and I know I'm not the only one. I acknowledge that this kind of overhaul is an enormous undertaking, but even if we go one page, one section at a time, it'll make the WIKI that much more useful, reliable, expedient, trustworthy...</rant> Phew! Anyway, thanks for the info on searches, that'll definitely come in handy!

SuperApe → What, pray tell, is a "definition list." And yes, this is one of the places I came to find examples of WIKI page templates...

Tarquin: answer to questions:

click title of page to generate list of backlinks.
definition list is HTML DL tag, made by ;: in wiki: read the markup page. and thanks for the layout work here

SuperApe: Boy, that last comment of mine is old. I would like to suggest a sub-section on this page, but before I go and add it, I wanted some input from the "Wiki elders":

(see Content Ownership above)

This comes after edits made soon after page creation spur the author to accuse the editor of stealing and vandalism. The concept of a wiki isn't unique to this site, is it?

Sweavo: I think (uh, I'm not an elder :-) ) that something like this might be in order. If users have registered then all their contributions are logged and thus they are acknowledged as author. But all authors in real publishing expect to be edited, and that's the whole point of a wiki, not only lots of authors but lots of editors too.

Tarquin: Yup. Except the wiki software we use gradually forgets a page's authors. Look at the history of this one for example.

SuperApe: Does that mean you like the Content Ownership subsection, Tarquin? Should I go ahead and move it to the body of the page here?

Xian: Hello everyone :-) I'm new here but I have my share of experience with UE 1 and would like to share it to those still interested in such an old engine :-) (unfortunately I have no clue of anything from UE 2, but I noticed there are still some things regarding UE 1 which might need some filling up with info, thought you never know). I was curious if copypasting code from the UT SDK (code made by EPIC) is allowed here, as I wanted to make a few comments on a piece of code I recently read out of boredom.

Tarquin: I think that if it's obvious where the code has come from (eg it's on a class page), and it's a small piece, then fair use applies – go for it And I think it's understood anyway that when you write UnrealScript code you're going to be reusing snippets of Epic's code, the same way you reuse pieces of maps to make new ones.

Xian: just making sure nobody gets a bite out of justice with copyright issues well, since you have an affinity for brushes, check out what I'll post in the Mover section shortly and tell me what you think and tnx for your reply mate!

SuperApe: Moved the Content Ownership section to the main body of the page.

OlympusMons: Where do you post bugs on this wiki? I noticed when ever I type in a window the edit box resizes off the screen and makes it hard to see about 1/5 of the line. Its fine after I resize but as soon as I type its borked again.

Juxtapose: Somewhere there should be a description of the Summary box when editing pages. It took me a while to figure out that it only affects the "recent changes" section of the given page and not the page content itself.

Also, I haven't seen anything mentioned about what happens to your edits when you click "Save." Either I have amnesia or someone has been moving my edits stealthily.