Help talk:Posting stories

User Subpages

A note on the User Subpages... posting stories under User:username/storyname categorizes the story title under "U" instead of the first letter of the story, and the "User:username" shows up on the Category:Story page. Kinda ugly. :) Did I do something wrong? (Other than that, everything looks great!) Thanks. -Virmir 00:43, 19 July 2007 (EDT)

You didn't do anything wrong, I just hadn't got around to creating a page describing some of the little gotchas of MediaWiki's categorization scheme yet. :) I've just banged one together as a result, you can find it at Help:Categorization. Basically, if you want to change how your page is sorted in the category listing you can provide an alternate sort key either for that one specific category ([[Category:Story|Slips of Paper]]) or as a new default for all categories on that page ({{DEFAULTSORT:Slips of Paper}}). Bryan 00:47, 19 July 2007 (EDT)

Excellent. Thanks for the help! -Virmir 17:01, 21 July 2007 (EDT)

Tutorial

BD, I think we need a very basic primer on how to create pages in a wiki format. It's not really intuitive for new users. It's not really intuitive for myself, for that matter, and I've used it more often. It needs to be laid out in plain language. --Buck 15:32, 21 July 2007 (EDT)

Special characters

I'm working on adding a bit about the use of smart/curly quotes on pages. Beyond "Don't use them in page names" are there any other "gotchas" I should mention? — ShadowWolf 16:07, 14 August 2007 (EDT)

The only quote-related gotcha I can think of is if one wants to combine italics or boldface with a single quote, as in "that is the llamas' scepter! It belongs to them!" MediaWiki is Unicode compliant and in theory should be able to swallow practically any character one wishes to throw at it without problems on our side of things. The only risk is that some peoples' browsers won't be able to display them properly. Bryan 20:20, 14 August 2007 (EDT)

Now that I think of it, we don't really need to "ban" obscure characters in titles either. If there's a title that's hard to type on a common standard keyboard, one can simply create a redirect from the easy title to the correct one. Bryan 20:26, 14 August 2007 (EDT)

Re: Buck's Confusion

It's like this, Buck...

According to the Help files on posting your stories, it says that in order to create a new story, simply create a link on your existing user page and it will make a new page for the story to be edited. But if the story is to be part of a series, then the help files say that you should make the link on the user page go to a page that all of the stories in that series will stem from, which is why it appears that there is a normal page for it.

But then, the Help files say that in order to get your story listed into the proper 'quick links' section, Categories for example, that you have to place a (category:TITLE) link at the bottom of your story page, which creates a NEW Category page that AGAIN must be edited, therefore, it appears on the site that there is two of these pages.

As I said before, the Help files are not very clear on this AND if you think you're confused over it, then you should try to use the Help files as-is, posting exactly as it says, and you, too, will get the same results that I am getting. It simply makes no sense in the way it is written.

When ShadowWolf deleted my normal page for the TFA stemming page the first time, it screwed up the link leading to that page on the user page, and the Help files go on to say that it is the user's responsibility to make sure that all links lead exactly where you intend them to lead. And because it became ShadowWolf's fault for deleting that page, it should have also became his responsibility to make sure the User Page link led to the actual page that he intended the link to lead to. Because he did not update that link, I had to remake the page, because the Help files said that it was my responsibility to do it.

You people really should re-read over your own Help files. It isn't very clear at all. And THAT is why you're confused, Buck. --Riptide the Rat 21:46, 27 September 2007 (EDT)

If there is a blank page (or a page that, as a result of a move, contains nothing but a redirect) I will delete it. Doubly so if more than two hours have passed since the changes happened. I don't exactly remember this specific page, but if I deleted it soon after the move then I'm sorry about that. In any event, please don't create "holding pages" ahead of time–the namespace for titles is still very open. And with it being a standard practice to create stories as user-namespace subpages namespace collisions will be a long ways off. — ShadowWolf 23:19, 14 October 2007 (EDT)