Topic on Forum:Test Edits Board

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Thanks for briefing him, ILC. Hi, GalaxySagi77, and welcome to the wiki! ilikecomputers did a pretty good job of covering the basics, but there are a few more things you should know.

First, if you didn't read the top-of-page notice, we have a Moderation system in place. We instituted it two years ago when we had a literal storm of spammers flooding the wiki with bogus pages. Basically, it works like this: until the admin staff here is confident that you're both not a spammer and know your way around the wiki and our standards, all your edits go into a moderation queue, where they must be approved by a wiki admin before they actually are applied to the page you edited. As ILC noted, we'll reject edits that flunk our style or content guidelines, or which have copyrighted text from TV Tropes. (The latter is basically anything that was added after the change in TVT's Creative Commons license in July 2012.) When we do, though, we'll explain why and point you at what you need to know or do to fix it; rejected edits are not "one strike and you're out"; you can always try again.

We have a lot of the wiki's look-and-feel sort of "pre-packaged" into templates and boilerplates; this is why we like for people to use the Page Creator, especially when they're starting out. You basically choose a page type, give it a title and hit a button, and you're then put in an editor with a skeleton page that you just have to add content to. (Oh, and don't delete anything that you don't understand -- everything in our page boilerplates has a purpose, and the few optional bits are marked with a comment saying so).

We use MediaWiki markup (which only makes sense because we're a MediaWiki wiki). It overlaps a bit with PMWiki (TVT's original wiki code), but is very different (and far more flexible) in other ways. We have a whole namespace of help files, but All The Tropes:So You're a TV Tropes Refugee should have everything you need to get started. Help:Formatting also has lots of helpful info.

Our equivalent to YKTTW is the Trope Workshop. Use the prompt on that page to create a new trope candidate -- it works like the Page Creator, only it creates the skeleton trope page in the Trope Workshop namespace. Because we're a smaller operation with fewer folks focusing on the Workshop, we take our time on tropes, so don't expect to see a new idea ramrodded through in three days. Oh, and we have a guide to what we like to see and suggest you do when creating a trope at All The Tropes:Trope Workshop Guidelines.

On the subject of guidelines, ILC noted that our standards for new work pages appear daunting, but honestly, it's a list of ideals, not a must-have checklist. Our bare minimum is a decent description (a paragraph or more, please), and at least five tropes (themselves with descriptions, preferably including analysis of the roles the tropes play in the story).

Let's see, what else? Hm. There's our Content Guidelines, our terms of service, and our Policy for Wiki Staff, which is essentially our manifesto on how to run a wiki differently from TV Tropes. And finally, there's How We Do Bans Around Here. This is the wiki policy strictly controlling how and when user bans can be applied by an Admin. We want you to be aware that unlike TVT, we do not ban users on whims or because we're cranky -- and that you know what we do ban people for, and what it takes, so you can avoid future problems.

-- Looney Toons, admin

@Labster @Looney Toons @GethN7 @Robkelk @QuestionableSanity @Derivative @SelfCloak