Help:How to help

The Vintage Story Wiki is primarily a community effort, and we're always looking for more helping hands to fill it out! While it may seem daunting at first to get involved, this guide will try to make it much more approachable.

The Community noticeboard is a good page to visit often for any info or news regarding the state of the wiki, as well as edit requests other users have made.

Getting started

Editor rights are not given to users by default. If you'd like to help improve the wiki, request editor rights in the Official Vintage Story Discord server. Create an account here, and provide your wiki username in the wiki-and-translations channel of the Discord server.

If you'd like to practice wiki-editing without the fear of breaking a live page, try creating a sandbox sub-page for your own account (click the link to go to yours). Any changes you make there will only reflect there.

Wiki guidelines

The Vintage Story Wiki is an online documentation repository for any information relating to the game Vintage Story. As such, all content presented should be relevant to the game or the wiki itself in some way. This wiki can be edited by anyone whom has received editor rights, but still has a set of rules that they should all follow.

1. Do not spam, vandalize, or edit disruptively in any way.
2. Treat other editors and potential readers with respect, and do not attempt to harass users.
3. Do not use the wiki to advertise third-party communities, game servers, or organisations.
4. Abuse of alt accounts to bypass bans is strictly forbidden.
5. Make use of any content uploaded to the wiki - anything that goes unused for too long will be removed.

Helping out

There are a myriad ways of determining what pages need to be made, or improved upon. One easy way is to just talk to people! Requests for wiki expansion are very common on the Discord server.

• Many pages that need work are marked as Stubs, meaning that they are lacking information and need to be expanded upon. The Incomplete Pages article also lists a handful of articles that need help.
• Links marked like this are dead ends, and have no pages tied to them. Generally speaking, these will be articles that need to eventually be created, and are a great way to get ideas of what pages to create.
• The Community noticeboard also has a more generalised list of content that other users have requested.

We also have some categories set up that mark pages that need a bit more attention. They are generally added by tagging them with a notice template at the top of the page:

• Category:Stubs, marked by {{Stub}}
• Category:Under construction, marked by {{WIP}}
• Category:Outdated pages, marked by {{Outdated}}

If you want to create new pages for items or blocks, you can also try these page creators. They will pre-fill a page set up for a new item or block page, with the appropriate templates and navigation boxes. Translation tags are not added, since these should be manually added after most of the content is added. Remember - new pages should be titled in sentence case (only capitalize the first word)!

New item page

New block page

Editing

To begin editing an article, click the Edit button at the top right of the page. This will present you with a WikiText source editor interface, where you can create any sort of wiki article. Be sure to follow the style guide while editing so as to maintain a consistent appearance for all wiki articles.

When editing, make sure to leave in the <!--T:-> marks - these are required for translation. Do not remove or change them for existing pages. For new pages or sections, new section markers will automatically be added. Removing or changing these markers can result in already existing translations getting removed.

Use Template:Localized_link for all of your links inside Vintage Story Wiki. Example: {{ll|Crucible}} or {{ll|Starter Guide|How to play}}

When you're done editing you can preview your changes with the Show preview button at the bottom of the page. If you're satisfied with the changes you've made, be sure to write a summary of what they are to allow other editors to know what changes you made before saving the page. Changes made are not permanent, and can always be reverted if need be, so don't be afraid to make changes if you're scared of making mistakes!

Practicing your editing

If you want to test a new page you have created before publishing it on the wiki, or if you want to practice modifying a page, you can create one or several test pages in your user space, for example at: https://wiki.vintagestory.at/index.php/User:Johnny/Sandbox/Test1 (replace "Johnny" by your wiki user name). In that page, you can copy and paste the code from another page and practice using titles, images, templates, infoboxes and everything that is on a real wiki page. You can even practice using the translation markers, mark your test page for translation and practice translating your test page. When you are satisfied of the content of your test page, you can copy and paste its code on the real page of the wiki.

Media

It is likely that you will have to upload images or other forms of media to use in your edits. To do so, head to the Upload page. If you're uploading an icon of an in-game block or item, make sure that it follows the naming conventions put forward on that page before uploading it. To find already-transparent, up-to-date images of all items and creatures, use the following command in-game: .blockitempngexport inv 400 then wait a minute or so for the export process to complete. This will add an "icons" folder to your Vintagestory installation location, including both block and item images in .png format. Exporting images 400 pixels x 400 pixels ensures that high resolutions are available at need.

In order to embed an image in an article, simply link it as such:
[[File:<name>]]
You can alter the size of the embed by adding a pixel size after the file name.
[[File:<name>|<size>px]]

Projects

Community projects can be found on the Projects page. These are all user run, and generally open to outside help - they can vary vastly in scale and are documented for other people to share their opinions, or help out.

Editing articles
Hubs	Community noticeboard
Guides	How to help • How to translate the wiki
Styling	Style guide • Versions