Help:New Pages

When a lot of new editors start, they look at the wanted pages and start straight in on trying to fill the most linked-to pages. This is good! In principle, at least. However, a lot of these pages get deleted straight away because they don't meet our minimum requirements and style guide. This is bad! It can be quite discouraging to new users, and it makes us very sad because it's extremely easy to avoid.

The easiest way to start a new page and make sure it's got the right formatting is simply to copy an existing page. There are thousands of properly formatted pages already present. A simple copy-paste will give you the basic formatting structure, especially if you copy a page for a similar subject; then you just have to change the content and fill in the blanks.

Bad New Pages

Let's look at the sort of page we usually get. The one that gets deleted.

Ocean city is an enormous structure designed as an energon drilling platform. It also serves as one of many bases on earth for the Autobots. It has a space bridge built in to it and also has housing quarters for human and transformer alike.

That's it. That's the whole thing. This is an actual page that was submitted to the wiki. Not much, is it? It doesn't give you any context to understand what the heck you're reading. We mark these for deletion out of principle, because in cases like this no page is better than one this bad.

Traits of Good New Pages

To increase the chances of survival for the pages you create, there are certain traits that help significantly. The more of these guidelines you follow, the more likely we are to keep the page and fix up its remaining errors, rather than flat-out delete it.

Continuity identifier

Good new pages identify the applicable continuity, if there is a specific one, at the top of the page. This is expressed as a single sentence, indented and italicized. For the above, the code for this would be:

:''Ocean City is an [[Autobot]] base from the [[Energon (cartoon)|Energon]] portion of the [[Unicron Trilogy]] [[continuity family]].''

Now, let's look at the elements here. It states the name of the article, the associated faction, the cartoon it appeared in, and the greater continuity that cartoon is part of. Easy-peasy.

Intro Paragraph

Here is also where a lot of new articles fall short. The example above is actually not that bad in this respect, in that it has three sentences. It should have more, but it's better than some. We expect at least a few sentences. If you're only going to write one, don't even bother. The main problem with the paragraph here is that it doesn't bold the name of the article. Edited to accommodate that, the code would be:

'''Ocean city''' is an enormous structure designed as an [[Energon (Energon)|energon]] drilling platform. It also serves as one of many bases on earth for the [[Autobot]]s. It has a [[space bridge]] built in to it and also has housing quarters for [[human]] and [[transformer]] alike.

Fiction Section

Good new articles have a section for the fiction the character, place or item appeared in. If it's a new article you don't have all the info on yet, this section can be stubbed. It just helps if it's there, so other editors can fill it in. For example if we were stubbing the above article, we would do this:

==Fiction==

{{stub}}

Categories

Every page should belong to one or more categories. Typically at a bare minimum it needs a franchise category to properly sort it. If it is a character, it needs one or more character categories added as well. Don't be afraid to browse the category tree to see if you can find additional categories that apply. For the example above, the categories would be:

[[Category:Autobot bases]]

[[Category:Energon]]