Bio Support

[Renos]

If you would like any tips or advice in updating your bio feel free to post in here. Any member of the community is welcome to answer with their opinion and suggestions. It is up to the person asking for support to then decide for themselves which bits of feedback if any they want to use.

[Sal Taybrim]

Is there a really good guide for wiki formatting?

In the fleetwide chat today, I noticed quite a few people remarking that they enjoyed writing up things for their bios, but they were struggling - sometimes for hours - with html / wiki formatting.

Conversely are there templates for things like dividers or quote bars?

[Renos]

http://wiki.starbase118.net/wiki/index.php?title=Help:Editing

That is a really good resource to use to find the most basic wiki tags that a bio will use. There is also a tutorials page here:

http://wiki.starbase118.net/wiki/index.php?title=Featured_Bio_Contest_Tutorials

with some very useful templates and lesser known tips. Those are two very good places to start.

[Sal Taybrim]

Cool.

A few notes from someone who has thoroughly combed your wiki for tutorials:

Your second link is not easily accessible from any wiki tutorial page. I found the first link while searching for information but the second one I only saw now that you linked it. It would be helpful to have a page on the wiki that has hotlinks for all wiki tutorials

Things not included in any tutorial I can find on the wiki:

1. All the Featured Bio winners of 2013 have specialized dividers for thier categories ("stats" "personality" ect) in the color of their department. However new ensigns do not get these dividers. While I could steal them from someone else's bio, I don't like clicking the 'see' or 'edit' button of another person's work. Can you have these divider templates / pictures on a wiki page or information on how to create and edit them.

2. I can not find how to place pictures on the right side of the screen - or the middle of the screen. It defaults to the left.

3. I can not find a tutorial on how to place a box around the pictures with an annotation

4. I can not find a tutorial on how to create an 'expand/reduce' field

Perhaps if the wiki cannot host such tutorials, there could be a forum link to what websites do host such tutorials. I went on wikipedia to search wiki tutorials, but their information is very dense and difficult to navigate (like using AutoCad to draw a stick figure.)

[Renos]

Thanks very much for your comments. They are very helpful to me and here's what I am going to do.

The second link was found on the Featured Bio Contest Nav Bar on the wiki, but I am going to include the link in other key locations such as the character's guild Nav Bar, which displays on relevant pages such as Creation and Upkeep of a Character Page.

As for the things you want to know more about but for which no tutorials exist - I can and will happily make tutorials and post links to them here once complete.

[Chen]

The best possible advice I can offer is to try to change your opinion about clicking edit on someone else's work. That's the single best resource for learning to use wiki code that we can offer you collectively as a group. If you see something you like, hit edit, look at the code, and adapt it into yours!

Everyone who uploads material onto the wiki does so under the creative commons agreement, which basically informs them that such things can happen. I have yet to encounter anyone in the fleet who would mind one bit about you emulating a piece of wiki code from their bio, so please don't worry about it.

For the pictures, try [[image:Filename.jpg|thumb|This is my caption]] - that should do the job you want. Creating collapsible tables is much more complicated - I can try to explain it here if you'd like, or if you have a table that you want the collapsing code added to then I could make it work for you.

[Rahman and Rivi Vataix]

Don't forget! The 118Wiki follows pretty much the same markup language as wikipedia, so the extensive tutorials for that wiki as well as for other wikis available on the web often apply to our wiki. For instance, here's a good guide to images that answers your questions about how to place an image center, right, with an annotation, etc: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Images

And yes, please feel free to copy what others do. It's the best way to learn how to edit on the wiki.

That said, just two issues I see frequently:

1) Please use "class=toc" instead of "id=toc" in your sidebox templates. There's been a lot of copying and pasting of old character sidebox templates that still have the id instead of class parameter, and what that means is when someone clicks "hide" in your table of contents, it also hides your sidebox's contents.

2) If you have created a table and you are using the ! marker instead of just | for a row, you are actually creating a column header and do NOT need to put ''' to bold things or center alignment as those two formating options are done automatically for column headers.

So for instance

! style="background:#0F4D92;" align="center" |'''Commanding Officers'''

can instead just be

! style="background:#0F4D92;"|Commanding Officers

[Rahman and Rivi Vataix]

Also, in regards to [show/Hide], those are often created with collapsible tables: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Collapsing

If you don't want the table border, you'd set the border to 0. More on table formating here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Table

Finally, you asked about quote bars. I've imported the wikipedia template quote box to the 118 wiki: http://wiki.starbase118.net/wiki/index.php?title=Template:Quote_box

which can create quote boxes such as seen here: http://wiki.starbase118.net/wiki/index.php?title=Rahman,_Roshanara/Relationships

The documentation on how to use it is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Quote_box

[Zephyr]

There doesn't appear to be a creation bar thingie for "fruit salads" (service ribbons and awards.) I seem to be having a little bit of trouble getting mine to display properly in the nav bar.

[Rahman and Rivi Vataix]

The answers you seek: http://forums.starbase118.net/index.php?/topic/6793-displaying-your-ribbons-and-awards/

[Jansen Orrey]

I will admit without hesitation to doing exactly what Deigo was talking about by clicking edit for some neat ideas.

[Ensign Ambrosia Hayley]

As do I. The best way to learn is through what other people have done!

Edited December 9, 2013 by Lt. James

[~Mo~]

I have a problem, can somebody check and save my sanity, please.

I want to make 2 collapsible gallery tables one after another and obviously can't figure out why previous table don't want to close to give another one it's life.

http://wiki.starbase118.net/wiki/index.php?title=User:Wanda_DyAmone

[Alora DeVeau]

Mo, which tables do you want collapsible? the characters?

I have collapsible tables on my wiki. Feel free to check out my code. Don't hesitate to ask if you need help modifying it.