Editing Guidelines

Hello and welcome to the Fallen London Wiki, Delicious friend! We are touched that you would want to share your knowledge with your fellow Londoners!

Editing Rules

For this wiki, there are a few rules:

1. Always use gender neutral pronouns when writing user-created content, such as guides, and change them if you find any non-neutral pronouns. The wiki is used by all genders and not all Fallen London characters follow traditional gender roles anyway, and we are all welcome.
2. You may not post any reward information on Fate-locked actions. However, you may provide info on material rewards and mechanical functionality in guides. For example, the Pentagrammic Skull is only available through Fate but we can and do include its mechanical effects in our Skeleton Guide. FBG's view is that "reporting the functionality of a bone gotten from a Fate story is actually positive rather than negative from a marketing perspective".

• If you see any pages that violate this rule, mark it for deletion via Template:Delete, preferably with a comment that explains why you have marked it for deletion.
• You may still make item descriptions of Fate-locked items. Just don't mention how to get them unless it's mentioned in the description.
• As a rule of thumb, you can only contribute content that Fallen London gives for free (i.e. if a free user can't see it, it's probably not allowed here).
  • Do not include storylets that only cost 1 Fate; the cost is mainly a hint from FBG that they want these actions to remain hidden.
  • You may include content that was intentionally made available for free, even for a minority of players.
• For more on this, please read: New Wiki Policy and Updates to the Fate policy

3. You can only quote up to 250 characters of narrative content at a time. This applies to all in-game content (that isn't covered by rule 1). When you use templates this is worked out for you: the page will warn you when a description field is too long. Either cut it shorter or write a summary in the matching summary field.

• If you shorten or remove description on articles that violate this rule, please make sure to add the Trimmed category when you're done. Follow the link for explanations on how to add categories to articles.
• Please don't just take the first 250 characters and cut the rest. Pick out interesting or crucial sentences. You can always hit 'Preview' to get an up-to-date character count.
• Please add […] or (…) to denote trimmed passages (aka, when you cut a sentence, put […] in its place. Example: A decidedly incautious approach). Otherwise the readers might not know that the article was trimmed, and that would be unfair to FL writers.

4. You may not post images which link directly back to Fallen London. Upload them to the wiki first.

If you are new to the Wiki style of editing, reading the Screenshot Tutorial for Editing and playing around in the Sandbox might help. :)

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask any of the active admins or contributors!

Quick Tip

A Quick tip for people who wish to use Templates:

Editing can be rather impenetrable with all the templates we use—my preferred method is to copy the complicated templates from other pages that do the same thing, then edit the fields. (This is easiest in the classic editor, which you can set as the default in your preferences.) Many of the templates also have documentation on their pages, such as Template:Action. That said, some templates are a little less clear in their usage, like {{Unlock}} being used for Unlocked with but not for Locked with. Eventually we'll have a proper guide to all of them but for now feel free to ask for clarification!

This tip was left on my message wall by Optimatum when I started editing on this wiki and contains one of the most useful pieces of advice I'v ever had, copying. If you want to create a new page but don't know how to use the Template just take a look at a similar page in source mode, copy it, change the details and boom! You've created a new page and hopefully learned something about the Template!

Disambiguation

To create a Disambiguation page please follow these steps:

1. Create a list of links for your page. Put {{Disambig}} Template at the top.
2. Now move the content to your new pages. I prefer to do it in source mode, where it's easier to fix copy-pasting mistakes, but do it in whichever way you prefer. :)
3. Back up, and revisit the Cards and Storylets your Actions point to. Update the Action page names to the new ones.

For an full explanation including examples please consult : User_blog:Neonix/Disambiguation_Pages.

Templates

There are customized templates available to help in formatting the content pages. Templates are the reason for the uniform formatting you see in the wiki, so always use them when submitting content!

A list of customized templates for Fallen London Wiki content can be found here.

The most used templates are probably {{action}}, {{card}} and {{storylet}}. Checking the documentation on these pages can help a bit for understanding the templates. If you edit in source, comparing with other pages can also help a lot!

The entry fields from the documentation are begun with a |

So Description should be written as |Description - note that this is case sensitive.

WikiText

If you are familiar with wikitext, you can directly edit the wiki source as well. A quick Cheat Sheet can be found here.

Categories

Help us track our pages! Always make sure that every page is linked to a relevant category. Keep in mind these few questions when adding categories:

• Does this increase my connections with other Londoners? Is this Connection a requirement?
• Does it add to any of your Quirks?
• Is there a Story to this?
• If a card: What kind?
• Does this action give out items?
• Does this action require items?

Images

Uploading to Photos gallery

We have quite a number of pictures already uploaded into the wiki -- feel free to use them! We generally use the same file names as the ones in Fallen London for easy searching.

To acquire the original file name in Fallen London, right-click the image and view it, or copy the image location. At the end of the web address, the "***.png" is the name.

Please do not link images directly back to Fallen London. Upload them first to the wiki database.

When you add/upload a new image to the wiki, look for the Licensing section. At the bottom, select "This file is copyrighted. The copyright holder has given permission for its use." (If you're uploading through the Photos gallery, Licensing is found under "More Options".)

(An exception to naming has been made for cameos, which are quite often used as profile pictures on the wiki; when newer versions arrive, we include 'cameo' in the file name rather than replace the original).

Adding them to pages

If you click the "Add Photo" button, you must select left or right alignment. To properly display images here, you don't really want to specify either.

To make it work correctly, you'll have to edit the page's source code (by clicking the "Source" tab, next to "Visual"). A nicely formatted result line will look like this:

*[[File:imagefile.png]] Example description here

When the image is aligned to left or right, it will include a |left or |right in the [[File:]] link. e.g. [[File:imagefile.png|left]]. Just take that bit out and it'll behave like you want.

Rewards

How to add rewards in source mode:

• Put an asterisk (*) to indicate that a reward is being added. Remember to skip lines.
• Use the correct template to indicate what exactly happened:
  • Use {{Item Gain}} if you got any items (and indicate how many)
  • Use {{Item Loss}} if you lost any items (and indicate how many)
  • Use {{Increase}} if a quality increased (indicate by how many CP if you know)
  • Use {{Drop}} if a quality dropped (indicate by how many CP if you know)
  • Use {{Move}} if you were moved to a new location as a result of taking that action
• Using those templates will automatically add the correct icon, a link to the item or quality as well as the standard text formatting of the game.
• For additional parameters available for each of the templates mentioned, please refer to the documentation on the respective template pages. Or just copy information from other wiki pages with the formatting you are looking for.
• add a {{Redirect}} if the action forwarded you to another storylet instead of the location where you currently are

Rare Success

Sometimes, the same action gives out different rewards. Rather than being a new version of the reward, there's always a chance that the different reward is a Rare Success, so don't edit the page just yet! Instead, leave a comment stating the different result, and wait for another editor to confirm it.

Incomplete Pages

If a page is missing information, placing a Template:Stub anywhere on it will help the editing team find it and fix it. This applies for missing images as well.

Living Stories - update 3/29/2012

Some Storylets now appear in a player's message feed, instead of the usual places in Fallen London. To reflect this, write "Living Stories" in the area labelled 'location' inside the Storylet Templates.

For more information, please consult: Forum:Living Stories.

Challenges (Narrow and Broad) - update 28 Mar 2013

During Feb 2013, the vast majority of the skill challenges were changed to a new 'Broad' difficulty. (There's an alternative introduction here, which can be linked to using the convenient short link Broad.)

It used to be the case that all challenges followed the same pattern (the 'Narrow' system). They were 'high-risk' for two consecutive levels; then 'chancy', then 'modest', then 'low-risk', each for two levels. At either end, it was 'almost impossible' or 'straightforward'. No players knew exactly what the probabilities of success were for each of these levels. Writing that a challenge was e.g. 'modest at level 70' meant that it was also modest at either 69 or 71; it pinned the challenge down to two possible values.

The new 'broad' difficulty means that a wide range of levels can leave the challenge as 'modest'. The difficulty is worked out as:

Probability of success = (Base multiplier) * (Quality Level) / (Difficulty Level),

where the multiplier is anywhere between 0.7 and 0.6 (I've tried to track this number User )Updated difficulty levels_elsewhere. The result is always rounded down. For example, with a multiplier of 0.68, a Dangerous challenge of level 100 will be classed as modest (61-70% probability) if Dangerous is anywhere from 90 to 104. So the old way of writing it up is too sloppy. A couple of alternatives:

1. include the probability e.g. 70 - modest (65%). You can see the probability by hovering your mouse over the black box showing the difficulty level. Now the information is available, there's no reason to omit it. With the difficulty multiplier still changing, however, these probabilities keep changing.
2. include the actual difficulty level e.g. a Broad challenge at Dangerous 100. This is trickier to work out - it generally involves plugging your skill level and the probability into a calculator to work out an approximate level, then shifting the skill level up or down until it's certain. Alternatively, the new difficulty level is usually the same as the old difficulty level, which occurred at the higher of the two 'chancy' levels. e.g. if the old challenge was chancy was 50-51, then the new challenge level is probably 51 (unless it's been altered in the meantime). Checking a page's history may show you the 'old' difficulty level if it's since been overwritten.

All things considered, the first approach is easier, but is likely to change; the second is harder but (for now) more accurate.

Admins

If you have any questions at all, no matter how dumb you think the question is. Please leave a message on the appropriate admin message wall. All Users below are a Admin and any other titles they might have are listed after their username.

Currently Active Admins

• Adnoam, also a Bureaucrat
• Rahv7, also a Bureaucrat
• Aximillio, also a Bureaucrat
• User:Alan, also Bureaucrat and Sysadmin

Other Admins

Admins listed below are currently not active on this wiki

• ZDee, also a Bureaucrat
• Achris
• Jemann, also a Bureaucrat
• Vae Victis
• Neonix, Bureaucrat and also Founder of this wiki
• Droxlean, also a Bureaucrat
• MrSuarez, also a Bureaucrat

This page is constantly being updated, check back soon!

Happy editing!

Neonix (talk) 06:03, March 31, 2011 (UTC)