Hi folks! I'm one of the newer admins over on the Wiki side of MTG Salvation. I hope you'll excuse this one thread crossing over to your subforum, because I'm here to ask for your help.
Our story articles themselves are in "okay" shape, especially for recent characters and events. I'd wager most score a 6 or 7 out of 10. We've even got stub articles for characters and planes so obscure I question their notability. So, we have information.
The first problem we face is finding that information. The navigability of the wiki is, frankly, trash. That's been a pet project of mine, and (after pestering some important persons for software upgrades) we've got access to the tools we need to easily build proper navigation at the foot of each page.
One project for helping visitors find story information is a navbox of primary story sources. One day, this should list every novel, The Duelist short story, comic, webcomic, official blog, official column, and so on ever published. If you can provide a citation to prove it is or was real, link it. If you can write an article summarizing it, you are the best of people. Note that this navbox isn't currently placed on any articles, pending a more complete state.
We also have navboxes for individual planes, like Innistrad or Theros. Frequently, these mix mechanical or product information with story information. Is that appropriate? I think it works alright, but it's a wiki and if you disagree, be bold and change it!
(well, maybe start a discussion on the talk page if you're making a hella big change. There are several regulars who'll show up to kick the topic around if anyone feels invested).
There are further navboxes scattered about. The Nine Titans and Weatherlight navboxes are built on a much older template, they're poorly focused, and they're linked all over the place. They need some major upgrades, but they represent a good idea: navboxes unifying not just planes, but story arcs.
A second major project, extending beyond just the story, is a series of portal pages. These are the wiki equivalent of a table of contents. You might have seen such prominently linked on the topright corner of the big daddy wiki. While none of this is anywhere near final (it's got lorem ipsum filler text!), here is the very rough draft of a story portal I've thrown together. Please, go ahead and add and remove and change the columns and their contents, however you think would best introduce a player to the massive story this game has accumulated.
And finally, we can always just use a few more sets of eyes. Whether you apply a strictly editorial perspective, or perhaps you're strongly invested in the life story of Gerrard Capashen, or maybe you're one of the long-timers with the mental equipment to unravel the continuity and tell us what's really true about Benalia in a postrevision post-Mending Dominaria: if you can write content, we want that help too.
For anyone fearing commitment, I promise no one bites (and we only revert rarely). Wiki editing is not a paying job, and if you simply drop a project halfway in, no sweat - your own concerns and interests take precedence for you, and no one's keeping track to hold a grudge against you. Anything you contribute is incredibly helpful. No matter how much any one person trawls the Internet Archive or digs for twenty-year-old comics, compiling this knowledge requires community effort.
I think that's my limit for encroaching on your forum. Thank you for reading this far, and I hope to see you on the wiki.
I would add that almost every link to the mothership on the wiki needs to be updated! I haven't had much time to put into the wiki, but I help when I can.
Wikipedia has a nice tutorial to introduce new editors, but at its simplest, just click the "Edit" link in the top-right corner of any article you want to improve. On most pages, you'll find that most of the article is written almost entirely in plain text, with a little bit of wikicode to style it and to link citations. Wikicode is a bit like Markdown, if you know that. Wikipedia explains it in full, but briefly: two apostrophes make italics, or three for bold; two or more equals signs surrounding a phrase to make a heading; and square brackets to link to other pages.
To link to another page on the wiki is very easy. Just type the article's name in a pair of double square brackets, like so: [[Urza]]. If the link comes out in red, that means the page doesn't exist (after the first letter, capitalization does matter: [[Magic: The Gathering]] is an article, but [[Magic: The gathering]] is not). If you want the visible text to be something other than the name of the article you're linking to, use a pipe character, as follows. Note that [[Ice Age]] would link to the set of the same name - wherever multiple things have the same name, some of them end up with parenthetical identifiers.
[[The Brothers' War]] was when a [[Mishra|rude dude]] and his [[Urza|cool bro]] caused an [[Ice Age (event)|Ice Age]].
The last big thing to know is about adding citations. You've probably read enough wikis to have a good feel for when they should be added to the text, but to be sure, you should definitely cite any statement that seems contentious or questionable. As an aside, questionable or not, articles should contain only verifiable information, not "original research", and this is definitely an issue with some of our older articles. That said, to actually add a citation, the most basic syntax is to just write a bunch of bibliographical information wrapped in <ref> tags, like so (single square brackets to link to a page off the wiki!):
This sentence might sound a little crazy, but that's literally what it said in the ebook.<ref>Name of author, [http://www.wizards.com/link_to_ebook_of_madness.html "The eBook of Madness"], ''Wizards of the Coast'', date</ref>
For convenience, we've got a few templates to help with citing common web sources, like the Mothership, or one of the official Tumblr accounts. Just copy/paste the appropriate chunk of code and replace the bits as needed - still wrap them in <ref> tags!
Additionally, since 2008, Wizards of the Coast has devoted efforts to acquiring new players.<ref>{{DailyRef|mtgcom/daily/mr321|Assume the Acquisition|[[Mark Rosewater]]|March 03, 2008}}</ref>
I hope that's enough to get you started! If you have any questions, feel free to bring them by our subforum, the community portal, or my own talk page on the wiki. Oh, and please be signed in on the wiki. It's much easier to talk when you've got a name rather than an IP address. =)
Our story articles themselves are in "okay" shape, especially for recent characters and events. I'd wager most score a 6 or 7 out of 10. We've even got stub articles for characters and planes so obscure I question their notability. So, we have information.
The first problem we face is finding that information. The navigability of the wiki is, frankly, trash. That's been a pet project of mine, and (after pestering some important persons for software upgrades) we've got access to the tools we need to easily build proper navigation at the foot of each page.
One project for helping visitors find story information is a navbox of primary story sources. One day, this should list every novel, The Duelist short story, comic, webcomic, official blog, official column, and so on ever published. If you can provide a citation to prove it is or was real, link it. If you can write an article summarizing it, you are the best of people. Note that this navbox isn't currently placed on any articles, pending a more complete state.
We also have navboxes for individual planes, like Innistrad or Theros. Frequently, these mix mechanical or product information with story information. Is that appropriate? I think it works alright, but it's a wiki and if you disagree, be bold and change it!
(well, maybe start a discussion on the talk page if you're making a hella big change. There are several regulars who'll show up to kick the topic around if anyone feels invested).
There are further navboxes scattered about. The Nine Titans and Weatherlight navboxes are built on a much older template, they're poorly focused, and they're linked all over the place. They need some major upgrades, but they represent a good idea: navboxes unifying not just planes, but story arcs.
A second major project, extending beyond just the story, is a series of portal pages. These are the wiki equivalent of a table of contents. You might have seen such prominently linked on the topright corner of the big daddy wiki. While none of this is anywhere near final (it's got lorem ipsum filler text!), here is the very rough draft of a story portal I've thrown together. Please, go ahead and add and remove and change the columns and their contents, however you think would best introduce a player to the massive story this game has accumulated.
And finally, we can always just use a few more sets of eyes. Whether you apply a strictly editorial perspective, or perhaps you're strongly invested in the life story of Gerrard Capashen, or maybe you're one of the long-timers with the mental equipment to unravel the continuity and tell us what's really true about Benalia in a postrevision post-Mending Dominaria: if you can write content, we want that help too.
For anyone fearing commitment, I promise no one bites (and we only revert rarely). Wiki editing is not a paying job, and if you simply drop a project halfway in, no sweat - your own concerns and interests take precedence for you, and no one's keeping track to hold a grudge against you. Anything you contribute is incredibly helpful. No matter how much any one person trawls the Internet Archive or digs for twenty-year-old comics, compiling this knowledge requires community effort.
I think that's my limit for encroaching on your forum. Thank you for reading this far, and I hope to see you on the wiki.
I would add that almost every link to the mothership on the wiki needs to be updated! I haven't had much time to put into the wiki, but I help when I can.
TerribleBad at Magic since 1998.A Vorthos Guide to Magic Story | Twitter | Tumblr
[Primer] Krenko | Azor | Kess | Zacama | Kumena | Sram | The Ur-Dragon | Edgar Markov | Daretti | Marath
Wikipedia has a nice tutorial to introduce new editors, but at its simplest, just click the "Edit" link in the top-right corner of any article you want to improve. On most pages, you'll find that most of the article is written almost entirely in plain text, with a little bit of wikicode to style it and to link citations. Wikicode is a bit like Markdown, if you know that. Wikipedia explains it in full, but briefly: two apostrophes make italics, or three for bold; two or more equals signs surrounding a phrase to make a heading; and square brackets to link to other pages.
To link to another page on the wiki is very easy. Just type the article's name in a pair of double square brackets, like so: [[Urza]]. If the link comes out in red, that means the page doesn't exist (after the first letter, capitalization does matter: [[Magic: The Gathering]] is an article, but [[Magic: The gathering]] is not). If you want the visible text to be something other than the name of the article you're linking to, use a pipe character, as follows. Note that [[Ice Age]] would link to the set of the same name - wherever multiple things have the same name, some of them end up with parenthetical identifiers.
The last big thing to know is about adding citations. You've probably read enough wikis to have a good feel for when they should be added to the text, but to be sure, you should definitely cite any statement that seems contentious or questionable. As an aside, questionable or not, articles should contain only verifiable information, not "original research", and this is definitely an issue with some of our older articles. That said, to actually add a citation, the most basic syntax is to just write a bunch of bibliographical information wrapped in <ref> tags, like so (single square brackets to link to a page off the wiki!):
For convenience, we've got a few templates to help with citing common web sources, like the Mothership, or one of the official Tumblr accounts. Just copy/paste the appropriate chunk of code and replace the bits as needed - still wrap them in <ref> tags!
I hope that's enough to get you started! If you have any questions, feel free to bring them by our subforum, the community portal, or my own talk page on the wiki. Oh, and please be signed in on the wiki. It's much easier to talk when you've got a name rather than an IP address. =)
I get an error thrown at me: