User:Stargazer/Page creation

This is a guide to creating new pages on the Coppermind. Due to issues with spam in the past, we have had to restrict the ability to create new pages to only approved editors. The Keepers can grant the permission that allows you to create pages to any user with an account on request.

To create a page, you need to navigate to the title of the page you want to create and then click the "Create" button in the top right. The two common ways of navigating to the title you want are:

1. Editing some page to have a link to the page you want to create, clicking "show preview," and then following the redlink you just created; or
2. Editing the part of the URL after /wiki/ of the Coppermind page that you are currently on to be the title of the page you want to create.

Note that page titles are case-sensitive on every character after the first. MediaWiki also distinguishes between curly and straight apostrophes and quote marks; only straight ones should be used. Finally, the slash character is used to denote subpages, and so should only be used if that is your intent.

Content articles

Before creating a new content article (outside of new articles from a book release), it is generally good to discuss with other editors beforehand. What needs its own article or should just be covered in a section on another page can sometimes be contentious and we prefer to work through that discussion before a page is created. Similarly, if you are unsure what to name a content page, there are guidelines at Help: Style#Article Titles, but it will often be best to discuss with other editors. While these differences of opinion can arise on any article—even ones you might think are completely clear-cut—and the process of discussing first is good as a general rule, it applies with particular force to general cosmere topics, which tend to draw more attention and different perspectives.

Once you are ready to create the article, it will often be helpful to copy the structure of a similar article, rather than writing everything from scratch. In this case, a similar article is ideally one that is both about the same type of thing and from the same world/series as the article you are creating.

Every content article should start with and infobox. If you are copying the structure from a similar article, the appropriate infobox should already be present, though you may need to adjust some of the parameters. For more information on using infoboxes, see Help: Templates#Example. If you aren't sure what infobox an article should use, a full list of the different infoboxes is available at Category: Infoboxes; you can also contact the Keepers for guidance.

Immediately after the infobox, if the article is going to contain spoilers for a recently-released book, you should place the {{spoilers}} template with the appropriate book code. See Help: Spoilers for how long after a book's release these tags need to be used for.

At this point, we move into the main body of the article. If the article is long, we will split it into sections; if it's only a few paragraphs this generally is not necessary. For some types of articles (characters, for example), we have a standard set of sections that we use when needed; these standard structures are listed at Help: Article structure. Empty sections that will be filled in later should not be used. A full list of help pages is available at Help: Contents; some that you may find particularly useful while writing the body of the article include:

• Help: Markup, a guide to MediaWiki's formatting syntax
• Help: References, a guide to adding citations
• Help: Style, our style guide

Finally, at the end of every article, we have the Notes section, which generally has three things:

1. The list of all references used on the page
2. The template for the completion status of the article
3. The appropriate navbar for the article's series

So, using a partially-complete article about something from The Stormlight Archive as an example, put together the Notes section would look like:

== Notes ==
<references />
{{partial}}
{{Stormlight}}

For a stub or complete article, {{partial}} would be replaced with {{stub}} or {{complete}} respectively and for something from another series {{Stormlight}} would be replaced by that series' navbar. A full list of navbars is at Category: Navbars.

Summaries

Book summaries have their own standard structure, which is described in detail at Help: Summaries.

Importing WoBs

The first time a particular WoB is used on the Coppermind, we need to import some of its metadata from Arcanum to use in the references list. When adding WoBs to a page, it is generally a good practice to check the references section for any redlinks that say "Missing Arcanum metadata, click to import." If there are any, you just need to click on that link, which will take you to the appropriate Cite: Arcanum page. After that, assuming you have permission to create pages, a script will automatically import the metadata through the Arcanum API; all you need to do is save the page. Note that this will not work if the entry has not been approved in Arcanum yet and does not currently work on mobile. When an edit might have WoBs to import, the absolute best practice is to press "show preview" when you are ready to save your edit and import the WoBs off of the redlinks in the preview of the references list and then save the edit. By doing so, the page is never saved with unimported WoBs and so it is never added to Category: Articles with unimported wobs; this is helpful because it takes a long time for the software to remove a page from that category once it is added.

User pages

In addition to having a user page, Special: MyPage, you can also create subpages of your user page for working on projects. For example, you might create Special: MyPage/Sandbox as a general-purpose workspace or Special: MyPage/Elend Venture if you are working on a longer update to Elend's page. You are generally free to structure these pages however you want (though, any work later moved to a content page should follow the guidelines for content pages); the one thing we do ask is that you break any templates that add content categories (generally, the infobox, navbar, and any tag templates), so that readers browsing those categories won't see your user page. The two common methods of breaking templates are putting an exclamation point (or any other character) between the two {{ that call the template or wrapping the template in <pre>...</pre> tags.

Other types of pages

The following are guidelines for creating pages in the other namespaces:

• Talk pages: Any logged-in editor can create a talk page, which is a page associated with another page for the purpose of discussing changes to the associated page (or, in the case of a user talk page, discussing something with the associated user). While most discussion happens on our Discord, talk pages are still occasionally used. When starting a new discussion on a talk page, please place it in a new section and make sure to sign your comments with ~~~~, which automatically adds your user name and a timestamp. See Help: Discussion for more details on talk pages.
• Project pages: Most pages in the Coppermind namespace are artist pages; see Help: Artists for details about how those work. Other new pages in the Coppermind namespace are rare and should be discussed before creation.
• File pages: All files (mostly art) uploaded to the Coppermind live in the File namespace. To upload a new file, go to Special: Upload and follow the directions there. Before uploading, make sure you have permission from the file's creator.
• Templates, categories, and help pages: New pages in the Template, Category, and Help namespaces are rare and should be discussed before creation.