Help:Contents

Welcome to 1d4chan. Remember, you're here forever.

Policies

The policies laid down by the admins can be found on the Policy page, but in brief (as stated on the front page):

• No egoboos 1d4chan is NOT for pages dedicated to specific browsers of /tg/, namefag or tripfag, regardless of how well-known or liked/disliked they are. The only exception to this is the drawfag page, which may list known drawfags and describe their usual subject matter. Please refrain from qualitative analysis of a given drawfag's talents or personality, as drama will inevitably ensue.
• No wars in the article If you find yourself in an edit war or anything similar with another user, move your argument to the article's discussion page. If you observe a dispute over an article and have an opinion one way or the other about it, comment on the discussion. Wikifag prefers to get input from as many people as possible before he has to make some sort of administrative decision about a given issue.
• Campaigns in the Campaign: namespace If you intend to use the wiki as storage for pages about your campaign, your main page should be at Campaign:Name and other related pages should be at Campaign:Name/Stuff. Your pages should also link to each other to avoid them appearing on the orphaned pages list. Wikifag won't punish users for forgetting to do this, but it helps keep the wiki tidy!
  • Use the Setting: namespace for articles related to homebrew (as opposed to offical) settings, following the same syntax.
• Deleting pages If you find a page that needs deleting, put the {{deletion}} template on it (by including that markup at the top of the page) and it will be added to the deletion category. Pages that should be deleted are pages for campaigns that are no longer running or no longer needed for that campaign, and pages of very low quality or subject matter unrelated to /tg/. Note that the criteria for "related to /tg/" is somewhat lax, and well-written pages that justify even a tangential relation to /tg/ are likely to be allowed to remain.
• Block Policy See the Policy page for a clarification of what behaviors are considered block-worthy. In short: vandalism and (excessive) edit-warring warrants a block of a few days, and link-spammers get permanently blocked. Use the talk page instead of the "undo" link.

Spam Pages

The most common sort of "page that needs deleting" that we encounter on this wiki is the spam page. These are pages with no /tg/ related content, and one or more links to an external web page or pages. They are either trying to boost said page's Google rank by making it look like more people are linking to it (which won't work, because this wiki -- like all MediaWiki wikis using the default settings -- specifically tells search engines not to use said links for page ranking purposes) or get people to click on that link, driving traffic (which won't work, because people view pages on this wiki that are interesting, which spam pages usually are not). If you encounter a spam page, mark it with the "{{delete}}" or "{{deletion}}" tags so the admins (Wikifag and AssistantWikifag) know to delete them.

All spam pages are different, but they tend to exhibit most of the following symptoms:

1. Containing a link to a dodgy-looking external site, usually one advertising a product or service.
2. Being the first (and often only) edit of a new user.
3. Being written in broken English or in a non-English language (for some reason, we get a fair amount of Polish and Russian spam).
4. Containing a generic, bland greeting ("Happy to be a member of 1d4chan.org, hope I can contribute to this nice site, see my web page: [spam link]").

We admins try to check a page's history before deleting it and blocking the creator, but we're not perfect, especially if there's a lot of spam to be deleted; if you think you have been blocked erroneously, either contact one of the admins by email or their talk pages (obviously as an IP address, if your account got blocked).

Editing

Use the "edit" link at the top of any page to edit it. See the main Editing help page for more detailed information, and for really detailed information, check out the the topic-specific pages:

1. Formatting Guidelines -- Follow these guidelines to help keep our pages readable.
2. Help:Category -- Technical details and usage guidelines for categories.
3. Help:Link -- Technical details and usage guidelines for links.
4. Help:Redirect -- Technical details and usage guidelines for redirects.
5. Help:Template -- At the moment, it's just an illustrated list of all the templates on the wiki, but it will eventually contain technical details, usage guidelines, and an explanation of how to make templates of your own.

If/when other editing help pages get made, they will be listed here.

Creating pages

To create a page, you have two options:

1. Create or find a link to the page you want to make. The link will look red, like this intentionally permanent red link. If you click that link, you will be brought to an editing window where you can create it.
2. Alternatively, search for the page's title in the search box. There will be a redlink to the page in the line "Create the page "[whatever]" on this wiki!" Click that link and proceed as above.

Namespaces

Namespaces are sets of pages with certain prefixes (or no prefix). Most content articles (i.e. information about traditional games) are in the "Main" or "Article" namespace, as they have no prefix. The User namespace consists of all pages starting with "User:", and by convention, "User:Foobar" is "reserved" for the user with username Foobar (there is no technical enforcement of this convention, hence the quotes around "reserved"; it's just polite). The File (or Image -- they are treated identically by MediaWiki) namespace is for, unsurprisingly, files and information about them. The Category and Template namespaces are for categories and templates, and they are rather different from the others; see Help:Category and Help:Template for more technical details.

Each namespace has a corresponding talk namespace (Talk, User talk, File talk, Category talk, Template talk,...), to be used for pages about pages -- for instance, if there is some disagreement about the page "Barbaz", users with an opinion on the matter might discuss it on "Talk:Barbaz". The User talk namespace works a little differently; it is meant for talking to a user, rather than only commenting on the user's userpage (in fact, many users on this wiki have a user talk page but have not bothered to create a userpage), and so when edits are made to a user's user talk page, that user will see a notification (if he or she is logged in).

Wikipedia's namespace page has more details on namespaces, but 1d4chan has a few special namespaces that Wikifag defined manually:

• Campaign is for personal campaigns and related articles -- character pages, session summaries, house rules, and so on. Pages in this namespace are not treated as "content pages" by the wiki; this means that Random page will not land on them, and they will not appear in the lists of Orphaned pages or Dead-end pages (pages with no internal links leading in or out, respectively). This is because campaigns are generally only of interest to the people running them; users browsing the wiki at random probably don't much care about games run by strangers over the Internet. Similarly, because these pages are really only used by people involved in the campaign, they probably aren't linked to by other pages, and probably don't have links to other pages (with the possible exceptions of character pages and other pages related to the campaign). If we didn't designate them as non-content, they would have an increased tendency to clog up those maintenance lists.
• Quest is for quests run on /tg/ and related articles. Though quests and campaigns are similar in many ways, they are given separate namespaces because they differ in a key respect: quests are run on /tg/ "in public", and involve many more people (potentially the entire board, for the really big ones). They are potentially of interest to the entire board and 1d4chan reader base, so pages in the Quest namespace are designated content pages, and therefore can be reached by Random page, and will appear in the lists of Orphaned pages and Dead-end pages. The suggested model to use when creating a new article describing a quest can be found at Quest:Quest Article Template.
• Setting is for /tg/-created homebrew settings. Like Quests, pages in the Setting namespace are content pages, for much the same reason. It is not meant for official settings (we have regular articles for discussing those) or settings that are within the scope of a single party's campaign (those should be part of the group's Campaign pages, e.g. Campaign:Foo/Setting).
• Story is for stories. Shocking. Pages in the Story namespace are also content pages, for the same reason.
• /TG/heim is for /TG/heim warbands, battle logs, league leaderboards, and other such pages.

These namespaces (in addition to the User namespace and all of the talk namespaces) support the subpage feature, allowing related articles to be grouped together -- for example, a campaign named "Foo" could have its main page as "Campaign:Foo", and then have character sheets at pages "Campaign:Foo/Character 1" and "Campaign:Foo/Character 2", house rules at "Campaign:Foo/House Rules", and so on; similarly, a homebrew setting could have articles on the various inhabitants as subpages, and a story can have its chapters as subpages (especially for really long stories). Subpages will have links to their parent page (and if they're several layers down, say "Campaign:Foo/Bar/Baz", they will have links to their grandparents and great-grandparents and so on, all the way up to the top -- subpages can have subpages themselves) at the top of the page, just below the title, and can be made to show links to their subpages with the SubPageList extension. For more information on how to use subpages, see Help:Subpages.

Moving pages

If you make a page or come across a page with the wrong title (e.g. it is misspelled, or in the wrong namespace), use "move" function -- hover over or click on the down-arrow by the Search bar and click the "Move" link to access it. Give the new title in the indicated space, and give a brief reason in the text box below. As long as there is not already a page with the new title (or if the page that is there is just a redirect with no other edits), the page and its entire history will be moved to the new title, while a redirect will be left behind at the old title, just in case there are other pages that link to the page at its old title (the fact that a redirect gets left behind also means that a page can be moved right back to the old title if you mess up). Check for new Double Redirects (redirects pointing to other redirects) and Broken Redirects (redirects that point to pages that do not exist) after the moving is done, and clean up any that get made as a result of a move; be especially careful if you are moving a page for the second time.