From StrategyWiki, the free strategy guide and walkthrough wiki

Contents 1 Welcome to StrategyWiki! 2 Nominating guides 3 Creating "personal" pages 4 Guide advice 5 "Locked" Table of Contents 6 Walkthrough status 7 Creating pages 8 Forums

[edit] Welcome to StrategyWiki!

Hello GaleZephule! Welcome to StrategyWiki. Thank you for your contributions. If you have any questions, just contact a sysop through their talk page or post on the staff lounge, and they'd be happy to help. If you need help editing, check the StrategyWiki Guide. If you have a question about the content on this wiki, you can check out our staff lounge page. If you want to ask questions or hang out in IRC, we're usually around. On the other hand, if you have ideas for StrategyWiki, bring them up on the community portal talk page. Please remember to sign your name on, and only on, talk pages by clicking or using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field as this helps to document all of your hard work. Feel free to delete this message from your talk page if you like, or keep it for reference. Happy editing! -- Baejung92 12:53, 9 February 2008 (CST)

Read the above paragraph, especially the bit about signing your name. Also, do not put spaces in front of paragraphs, it makes it format the paragraph in a way that we do not use on StrategyWiki. -- Safety Skizzerz ^{{{ Talk | Contribs | Spel Chek™ | VFG | RTFM }}} 19:24, 10 February 2008 (CST)

[edit] Nominating guides

Hi GZ. You don't need to tailor promising guide nominations quite so much, or credit people who have worked on the guide. Their work shows up in the guide's history. Simply make the nomination and then see if it gets voted. I'm not going to oppose the nomination, but I'm not going to support it either. It is very much the early beginnings of a promising guide, and as such, is not promising yet. It needs a lot more, such as images, maps, pokemon descriptions, etc. What you have there is more of a skeleton. Take a look at how Pokémon Red and Blue is laid out, and then you'll get a better feeling for how to make the guide more promising in the future. Good luck. Procyon (Talk) 17:05, 10 February 2008 (CST)

GZ, I don't know why the above would have sounded insulting to you. My advice is given to you as a sysop of the site, and as an author responsible for over 100 guides on this site alone. (see my contributions page.) While I am sure that you are very proud of the work done on your guide so far, I am giving you my honest analysis that it is not yet a promising guide. You may feel free to disagree. But if you would like it to become a promising guide, then in my opinion, it needs a lot more than what is presently there, and I know that people like Skizzerz and DrBob will agree with me. Their contributions to your guide are part of the roles that they have given themselves and proven to be incredibly talented at, which is cleaning up guides and bringing them up to certain standards that conform with the best of the rest of the guides on this site. They make those kinds of contributions to every guide, including the ones that I start. So don't be insulted, but also do not be discouraged. Keep fleshing the guide out and expanding on it quite a bit, and it will reach the point where it is a promising guide. Good luck. Procyon (Talk) 18:51, 10 February 2008 (CST)

[edit] Creating "personal" pages

When creating personal pages, please do so as a sub-page of your user page (such as User:GaleZephule/Pokedex Entries 1-20 instead of making a page in the main namespace, which is reserved for guides. -- Safety Skizzerz ^{{{ Talk | Contribs | Spel Chek™ | VFG | RTFM }}} 17:29, 10 February 2008 (CST)

Yes, I am the one that deleted the page. Anyway, here's the initial content (wiki code) you had there before I deleted it:

==001:Bulbasaur==
'''Type:'''Grass/ Poison
'''Abilities:'''
Overgrow: When Pokemon has low health, Grass-Type attacks are powered up.

'''Suggested Move List:'''

So you can copy/paste that or whatever to your subpage so you don't have to start over from scratch. Also, you may want to check out the Pokédex, which contains a lot of helpful links to bulbapedia. -- Safety Skizzerz ^{{{ Talk | Contribs | Spel Chek™ | VFG | RTFM }}} 17:44, 10 February 2008 (CST)

[edit] Guide advice

Hi GZ. I would be happy to help you out with your guide, except there's one problem: I don't know anything about PMD2 :( If you notice, I work on very old games :) Right now I'm working on NES/Famicom games from 1986, and I have my hands full with all of those. I'll help with whatever I can as far as formatting goes, but whether you wanted to be or not, you are StrategyWiki's foremost expert on PMD2. And we really appreciate all of the help that you're providing English speakers who don't understand the game as well as you do. What I would suggest you do is find some other PMD2 players and see if you can recruit them to help out. Lastly, please pay attention to Skizzerz's suggestions. I started this paragraph without an extra space in front.

I started this one with a space in front.

Do you see the difference? The one with the space is ugly. You don't need to indent anything that you write on StrategyWiki (or any wiki site for that matter). And also, do you know how it's me writing to you? Because I sign my posts :) You can just type ~~~~ at the end of your messages, or hit that Signature button at the top (between the red circle and the dash buttons). It's very important because you want people to know who's talking to them. Procyon (Talk) 19:35, 10 February 2008 (CST)

Also, create new guide pages by clicking the "Guide page" button over the edit box to populate the page with the correct page layout. Additionally, add all new pages you are going to make to the /Table of Contents sub-page (see below section). Oh, and give the editing guide a thorough read-through so that you know how to do a few things here formatting and layout-wise. -- Safety Skizzerz ^{{{ Talk | Contribs | Spel Chek™ | VFG | RTFM }}} 17:30, 11 February 2008 (CST)

[edit] "Locked" Table of Contents

ToC's are only protected if there's ongoing vandalism. You can access a ToC through a Header nav bar, where it says "Table of Contents." Another method of reaching the page is to modify the url of the guide you're looking at and just typing in /Table of Contents after the base page (the guide's) name.

Please sign your posts correctly from now on (there's a button in the blue shortcut buttons, or you can just type --~~~~). Thanks, --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 22:41, 10 February 2008 (CST)

[edit] Walkthrough status

I don't have time to review it thoroughly at the moment, but I will try to check it out when I can find the time. After a cursory glance, what I can tell you is this: Ultimately, we would like the Walkthrough to be broken up over several pages, one chapter to a page. If you look at a lot of the other guides on this site, including the original Pokémon Mystery Dungeon guide, we try to avoid gigantic single page walkthroughs. It makes it a lot easier for readers to find what they're looking for without seeing any spoilers. In fact, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is an excellent example of a guide that you should be trying to imitate. It's not yet complete, but it is set up very nicely with screenshots. Procyon (Talk) 14:05, 13 February 2008 (CST)

Do what exactly? If you mean screenshots, an excellent way is to use emulators, but either you know how to use them or you don't. I really don't have time to explain everything about how to setup an emu and get ROMs and run the game and take screenshots. If you can't do it, then eventually someone else will probably come around and do it for you, but the guide won't really be considered high quality without them. The text is the most important part since anyone can do screenshots. Focus on writing the material, and then we can work on making the guide fancy later. Procyon (Talk) 14:14, 13 February 2008 (CST)

Just create a subpage off of the main PMD2 directory. Either name them by chapter, or name them by location, which would probably be a better choice. You already seem to have links to subpages within the Walkthrough itself. So the appropriate portions of the walkthrough should actually appear on the subpages. The Walkthrough page, ideally, should only contain a brief description of how progress in the game is made, or perhaps an outline of the places you need to visit. I would really recommend that you read the Strategy Wiki Guide for this kind of information, and really start to examine how other guides are put together. You really seem to want to do a good job, and I applaud you for that, but there are a number of great examples on this site that you can learn from if you are really intent on creating a promising guide. Good luck. Procyon (Talk) 14:21, 13 February 2008 (CST)

By "good guides" he really means check out the completion level 4 and featured guides. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 21:10, 13 February 2008 (CST)

[edit] Creating pages

Make sure that when you create pages, they do not have spaces after the slash (so "Page/Subpage", not "Page/ Subpage"). Also, please make use of the "Guide page" button found above the edit box when starting new pages so that the proper formatting may be applied. Thanks, and keep up your good work! -- Safety Skizzerz ^{{{ Talk | Contribs | Spel Chek™ | VFG | RTFM }}} 17:48, 14 February 2008 (CST)

[edit] Forums

While creating forums on your user page is not expressly forbidden, it is highly looked down upon as an inefficient use of space. StrategyWiki is in the process of developing forums on a dedicated server whose growth will not impact the wiki server in any way. I would recommend that you dismantle your forum pages. Please mark the ones that we can remove with {{delete}}. Thank you. Procyon (Talk) 18:17, 20 February 2008 (CST)

This should not require an explination, and should be fairly obvious. The purpose of StrategyWiki is to host video game guides and images. It is not here to facilitate any discussions beyond the construction of those guides. There are plenty of websites that host forums, and there is no need to use the resources of SW to make a very poor forum when many other websites can do a much better job. When someone edits a page (such as one of your forum pages), the entire page is stored in the database. Therefore, everything that was said by any user gets saved over and over again, and it's a horrible waste of space. We already have the Community issues and Staff lounge pages, and there is no need for any SW user to provide any extra methods of communication beyond what already exists. Bottom line: a wiki makes a terrible forum. Procyon (Talk) 20:55, 20 February 2008 (CST)

STOP continuing to not sign your posts on talk pages. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 23:29, 20 February 2008 (CST)

We give a fair bit of freedom for people to do almost whatever they want in the user space. It isn't so much about space or rules, but what is good for the community. The typical way conversations are held on wikis is through leaving messages on the relevant talk pages. Having a mini forum out in the middle of nowhere doesn't help since very few people are going to find it, and it decentralizes the discussions from the articles themselves. On a somewhat related note, could you please voice your opinion on Talk:Pokémon Mystery Dungeon 2/Walkthrough? You are currently our expert on the game, and I'd like to know what you think. Happy editing :) -- Prod (Talk) 23:40, 20 February 2008 (CST)