Warhammer 40k - Lexicanum:First steps

Helpful articles

Creating an account

Should you decide to become an active member of the Lexicanum team the first thing you will have to do is to request an account (you will find all necessary information under this link). To avoid all potential misunderstandings: If you only want to read the Lexicanum you don't need an account. This is only necessary if you want to become an Editor. Requesting this absolutely free account obviously does not mean you have to edit, it is and always will be entirely up to you if and how much you want to contribute. Your account will then be approved by an administrator as soon as possible and you'll then be able to edit. In the meantime, read on so you'll know what to do then!

Editing

In order to begin learning the basics of editing and creating articles, you should first visit the Immaterium, where you can experiment with the markup language Lexicanum uses. The Immaterium is an article created to allow new users to experiment with the markup without affecting important articles.

Simple Editing

Step	What to do	What Happens
1	Click here to open the Immaterium (you should probably open this in a new window - Shift+Click for most browsers - so you can still follow along on this page). (To open the Immaterium in a new tab in newer browsers that provide tabs, press Ctrl+Click for most browsers - so you can still follow along on this page).	The page Immaterium opens up. It probably already contains text written by other users.
2	Click on "Edit" near the top of the page. When the editing page loads, you may also want to open Editing Help (a link is located below the editing pane).	A new page loads showing all the content of the Immaterium, now capable of being modified. You'll probably notice several strange symbols, mostly short words in square brackets - [ and ] - or in angle brackets - < and >. These are "tags" that help to format the article to make it easier to read or to add certain special functions. The square-bracketed tags are MediaWiki tags (the basics are explained at Editing Help) and the angle-bracketed tags are simple HTML.
3	Make a few changes to the article and then click "Save Page" below. (Note: paragraphs can be made by inserting a blank line between two blocks of text).	The page is updated with your changes, and other users are able to view them (as well as a record of what changes were made and when). If, while you were editing the page, another user saved his version of the page, you will be notified that there is an editing conflict. In this case the upper text field contains the text of the other user, own your text below, and between them the difference between both versions. You can then choose whether to edit the page to incorporate the other user's changes, or upload your own version.

Adding Links and New Articles

Schritt	What to do	What Happens
1	At the Immaterium, click again on "edit" and add some text in double square brackets, for example: [[Angron]]. Then click on "preview" to show you the result.	You will see a link to the article Angron. If this page already exists, clicking on the link will take you to that article. If not, you will be taken to an editing window to add text to the article when you click on it.
2	If you would like the link text to differ from the article, add a "pipe" (looks like '|') after the name of the article and then type in the text you would like to be displayed. For example, [[Angron|World Eaters Primarch]]	You will see a link to the article Angron, but it will look like this: World Eaters Primarch.
3	The "pipe" as described above is also useful on its own. If you just add the pipe after an article name, it will automatically remove its namespace and any words in parentheses afterwards. For example, try typing [[Leman Russ (primarch)|]] and [[Category:Space Marine Legions|]].	You will see link to the articles Leman Russ (primarch) and Category:Space Marine Legions but they will look like this: Leman Russ and Space Marine Legions.

Where to Now?

You know have a basic understanding of how to edit and write articles. Congratulations! To go a bit further, you should check the Tutorial page for more info on useful markup tricks, Templates for more complex menus, tables and premade tools, along with the main Help page where you'll find info on whatever specific topic you might need.

Here are some additional remarks to help you get started beyond technical skills. You can also have a look at our Community portal.

Read and edit first

We would like to encourage our newcomers to start out slow. Look for a topic you are interested in, and read the articles that already exist. Click along. Sooner or later you will find a page to which you can add some information. Off you go! Click "edit" and edit away! Save it! On to the next article. Even small improvements help and increase the quality of Lexicanum as a whole

By reading articles and source code (which is the text form of articles that appears in the edit window) and editing that source code you will learn pretty quickly how a Wikipedia article should look.

A little note: the source code of some articles (for example Ultramarines) looks pretty complicated at first. The reason for that is that it contains tables, and the method for writing tables is, well, advanced. Don't let that stop you! Just scroll down a little more in the edit area. After the table comes the actual article text, which is much easier to read and edit.

Improving Sources

Every so often during your reading of the Lexicanum, you will inevitably come across a page which is not sourced properly, with either little or no footnotes or even wrong footnotes. This can apply to all elements of an article, from text to images to list items, etc. Depending on the case at hand you can now fulfill different very valuable tasks:

• If an article has no sources whatsoever please report the corresponding article to an Administrator so that it can be deleted. You can do so by editing and adding the Delete template {{Delete}}.
• If some paragraphs, sentences or other elements have no sources proceed as follows:
  • If you happen to know the (or a) source for the element in question please add the source. See the Help article on citations for more details.
  • If you do not know the/a source please add the Citation issues template {{Citation issues}} or {{CI}}. The article will automatically be added to the page.
• If you come across a footnote that references a source that is no longer available (normally that is only the case for websites) proceed as follows:
  • Try to find an archived version of the broken link via the Wayback Machine or similarly well-established archiving projects.
  • If that fails use the procedure for "Inactive, non-archived sites" described here.

Instead of just waiting to come across missing sources by coincidence you also have the options to specifically look for such cases. If you want to do that, you have the following options:

• All pages that contain elements that have been marked already as missing sources are automatically listed [[[Category:Lexicanum pages needing citation|here]].
• All pages containing quarantined content (i.e. content missing sources) are automatically listed here.
• Pages and files for which it is already known that their original source(s) is/are unfortunately no longer available are automatically listed here.

Orphaned Pages

For beginners it is a good exercise to link orphaned pages to make them accessible from other pages. You can find these pages under Orphaned Articles. Find articles that fit to an orphaned page and add a link to the unaccessible page. The easiest way to accomplish this is to add an internal links:

   ''See also:'' [[Article 1]], [[Article 2]]

Adding categories, portals and other templates is also recommended. For more information, consult the Templates page.

After that, create new content

On the other hand, everyone wants to contribute new content. One of the most common mistakes for beginners is starting after two minutes in the sandbox by creating five to ten new articles with only two or three words each in rapid succession. It is a big letdown to see these pages deleted in cold blood. However, that is what has to happen because we are trying to write an encyclopedia, something that can compare to the Britannica - well, at least on Warhammer - one day.

So, before you start on new articles: please read Warhammer 40k - Lexicanum:How to add a new page and tips for writing good articles. A new article should have some quality: a few lines are necessary and two or three are enough. One of the most important things is to always write complete sentences. Ideally, the first sentence should contain the term that is explained. Articles like "Lexicanum: It's an online encyclopedia" don't help much, and copying your thesis is also not a good idea in most cases: Joe Average should be able to make sense of the articles. But don't be too shy; we don't expect your articles to be perfect.

That is why we recommend reading and editing first, so you get a feeling for our style before you start on new articles. Have a look on the lower half of the new pages page to get an impression of how new pages should look.

Now, if you want to start writing new articles: On the Portal:Lexicanum there are some topics for which articles are requested (remember: really intend on writing a short article, not only three words!). Also keep in mind that a whole bunch of missing articles are on the Wanted Pages page.

Testing

Please experiment only in the Immaterium. Test masquerading as "normal" articles are deleted immediately. That means, you can't see if your test was successful, because an admin already deleted it. Furthermore, the admin had to spend some time and resources to delete that article, and because admins are friends, not food, you have to be nice to them by not causing them additional work.

Lists and placeholders

Creating lots of placeholders (articles that don't actually contain information) is another mistake common among newcomers. Also, often articles are created that contain only lots of links to sub-articles, which presumably is intended as some kind of subdivision, like History of 16th century France, History of 17th century France, History of 18th century France, History of 19th century France, History of 20th century France in the article on history of France - without some general information besides the links. However, content should, if possible, always be joined and not split over many small articles. So, if you have something to say on a topic, only create one article first. If it gets too big, you can always split it later.

Instead of placeholders, link to the article as if it existed already. Such a link will appear in red and will automatically added to the Wanted Pages list. That way, other editors will be informed of the need to work on them.

Adhere to copyrights

Sometimes users just copy text from copyrighted sources. If you find such a text (eg. with help of a search machine), please add it immediately under Deletion Candidates. Articles listed there will be edited or deleted.

Never use copyrighted material without permission of the proprietor!

See also: Games Workshop Copyright Policy

This article is based on the article Erste Schritte from the free Encyclopedia Wikipedia and is protected by the GNU License for Free Documentation. In the Wikipedia there is a list of authors available at List of Authors, and one may work on the article there.