Hello, I'm here from being suspended, then banned, then deleted my account and butthen tried to create a new account that went unapproved. I'm really confused on things work. Like how do I edit things? Can I create or contribute to new pages for media that's not up here (I wanna make a page for Web Animation named Spooky Month by Sr. Pelo for example)? I just like editing things in and show my thoughts on media off, I don't want to cause any trouble. I need help.
Topic on Forum:Test Edits Board
To edit, just click the "edit source" button right above the article you're reading. Using the source editor is recommended over using the visual editor, because the visual editor can do weird things to the underlying markup.
You can create pages for pieces of media without existing pages here, stated in All The Tropes:Works Pages Are a Free Launch. Our standards for new work pages, laid out in All The Tropes:Works Page Guidelines can be daunting at first, but most of it is stuff that naturally comes when you want to write a page. If you want to create a trope page, you'll have to do it in the Trope Workshop. Work pages, on the other hand, don't have to pass through anything, and you can just put them in the main wiki.
To create a page, you have multiple options. The simplest is to head over to All The Tropes:ATT Page Creator, which should set you up with all the markup you need. If you want, you can also create a page in your personal user sandbox (click your top right user profile then sandbox), to ensure you make a page you like without messing up the rest of the wiki.
Make sure to read All The Tropes:Style Guide before starting. Minor violations of the style guide will get patched by whatever admin (probably User:Looney Toons) moderating your work. Major violations or edits containing excessive grammar mistakes will be rejected.
Feel free to ask the admins for help. As long as you follow instructions, reply to mod messages, and aren't a spammer you won't get banned.
Good luck and happy editing!
Also, keep in mind that you cannot copy content from TV Tropes into All The Tropes unless you wrote every bit of content you're copying. This means if another editor changed your writing, you cannot copy the text on the page. Rather, you can only copy the text you wrote yourself. However, you are free to copy content from Wikipedia, if you note in the edit reason you used Wikipedia as a source (thus fulfilling their attribution requirement).
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
Hello and welcome, GalaxySagi777!
I see that almost everything has been covered... I'll just add that if you think you've been mistreated by a particular mod, you can ask any other mod to review the decision. Every mod, including me, has been yelled at by other mods for breaking the rules and had their decisions reversed.
--robkelk, admin
oh thank you! well so far, you all seem much more patient and nice than the TVT mods.
It's a point of pride for us. In every case we ask ourselves "What Would Fighteer Do?" and then do the exact opposite. <grin>
EDIT: Okay, I personally have to own up to getting snarky at users when stressed out. But even then, you're never in danger of getting kicked off the wiki (honestly, you have to work at it or come in deliberately to break the law or cause trouble), and anyway I've been much better about that in the last couple years.
Oh, one more thing! The wiki is a consensus-based community. If you think anything about how the wiki should be changed, we have a procedure for that -- All The Tropes:How to Get a Rule Changed. The process outlined on that page isn't just for rules, it's also for page names, images, or anything else that might be changed, but which shouldn't (or can't) be changed unilaterally.
And in case you're interested, we have a page laying out our history, both good and bad moments.