Help:Basics

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New to wikis? This page should help you get to grips with what a wiki is, how it works, and how you can help out!


What is a Wiki?

A wiki is a website edited by its community. These can be big public wikis (like Wikipedia) or small private wikis used inside a company.

Grand Theft Wiki is a public wiki that anyone can edit, so long as you Create an Account and Log in first.

This site runs on MediaWiki, which is the same website software used by Wikipedia. So the techniques you learn there will apply here. However, we do a number of things differently, and have different rules.


Finding Your Way Around

A wiki can be a daunting place. Grand Theft Wiki currently has 56,418 pages, so how do you find your way around?

Links

Wikis are not like normal websites, where you start on the homepage then click on a navigation button to get into a section. Every page contain dozens of links that let you jump to another relevant page, which helps you find the information you want quickly.

For example: the Grand Theft Auto IV page doesn't just link to more detailed pages about that game (like a normal website would), but it links across the wiki to pages like Rockstar Games, Xbox 360 and United States of America.

If you see a red link, that means the page it links to hasn't been created yet, or the link has been misspelled.


Categories

Every page is put inside a number of categories, which are collections of pages about a similar topic.

At the very bottom of every page, in a grey box, you can see the categories that page is in.

For example, at the bottom of Grand Theft Auto IV, you can see it's in the following categories: Infoboxes, GTA IV, Games, GTA IV Era.


If you click on the category name, you get taken to the category's page itself. This is a special page that links to all the pages relevant to that subject.

For example, Category:GTA IV contains links to all the pages about GTA IV, including Grand Theft Auto IV, Cheats in GTA IV and GTA IV Tips.


Pages can be in multiple categories. So because the Grand Theft Auto IV page is in 4 categories, you will find it listed on all 4 of those category pages.

Categories themselves can also be put inside other categories, when they become referred to as 'subcategories'.

For example, Category:Games contains a separate subcategory for each game. In each game's category, there are subcategories for missions, vehicles, characters, weapons etc relevant to that game. Each of those could be further subdivided into other subcategories.


This makes it very easy for you to find relevant pages, navigate around the wiki quickly, and find the information you want.


Recent Edits

Special:RecentChanges is a great way to see what's going on around Grand Theft Wiki. It shows all the most recent edited pages on the site, along with when they happened, who did it, and a summary of what they changed.

Random Page

If you can't decide what to look at, or you want to learn something new, just hit Random Article in the sidebar to be taken to a completely random page!


Editing

Almost all of the pages on Grand Theft Wiki can be edited by any user. This includes GTA-related articles, category pages, template pages, image pages, help pages, community pages and others.

Some pages can only be edited by Staff. These include protected pages, Grand Theft Wiki pages (which specify our rules) and MediaWiki pages (which change how the site looks). If you spot anything on these pages which need to be fixed, just let a member of staff know.


How to Edit

Making a simple edit (such as fixing a spelling mistake) is very easy

  1. Log in
  2. Find the page you want to edit - try Sandbox if you want to test it out
  3. Hit "Edit" in the top-right
  4. In the big edit box, find what you want to to edit (use Ctrl+F or Cmd+F to search)
  5. Below the big edit box, fill in an "Edit Summary" to explain you change to the page
  6. Click the "Preview Edited Page" button to make sure your edit works properly
  7. When you're 100% happy, click "Publish This Edit"
  8. Done! Your edit is now live on the site!

Many pages have complicated code which is easy to break. However, the best thing about a wiki is that ANYTHING can be reversed!

So even if you do break the code, anyone can easily undo the damage done. So be bold and have a go!

If you want to practice editing, have a play in our sandbox where you can try out editing and get the hang of how it works.


Code / WikiMarkup

Grand Theft Wiki uses the same code system as Wikipedia, because we use the same software as them (MediaWiki).

This means you can use code in pages to do thousands of different things

Here are some useful, basic formatting examples:

Code Example

'''bold'''

bold

''italic''

italic

A link to [[GTA IV]]

A link to GTA IV

A link to [[GTA IV | a page]]

A link to a page

A link to [http://www.bbc.co.uk A different website]

A link to A different website

==A Heading==

A Heading

===A Subheading===

A Subheading

*A list *With bullet points **And sub-points

  • A list
  • With bullet points
    • And sub-points

#A list #With numbers ##And sub-points

  1. A list
  2. With numbers
    1. And sub-points
[[Category:GTA IV]] Adds the page to Category:GTA IV

Templates

Templates are very useful (and often very complex) tools on this wiki.

A template is a bit of code that can be re-used on multiple pages.

For example, Template:Expand contains the yellow box you see on the right, and it also includes the code to add Category:Expand to the page.

To include a template in an article, all you need to do is put its name inside {{curly braces}} like this: {{expand}}

However, most templates are more complicated than that, and let you specify 'inputs' or 'parameters' that the template can use in its output (or to decide what output to show).

For example, Template:Quote lets you specify the text you want to be quoted.

So {{ quote | This is a quote }} produces:

This is a quote


There are some more complex versions of this known as Infoboxes, which produce the big information tables that show up on pages like GTA IV.

Images

You can also add images to any page on Grand Theft Wiki

To add an image that isn't already on this site:

  1. Ensure the image is saved to your PC first
  2. Go to Special:Upload}
  3. Browse your computer to select the image you want
  4. Add the appropriate Copyright Template for the image
  5. Pick a descriptive name for the image (such as: File:Bigfoot-GTAV.jpg
  6. Click upload
  7. Go to the page you want to add the image to (such as Sandbox)
  8. Click Edit
  9. Add the code for the image (see below)
This is a Caption

Whilst there are many ways to display an image on a page, a thumbnail to the right is the most common:

[[File:Banshee-GTAIV-front.jpg | thumb | This is a Caption]]