How to: Edit an Article

From Liquipedia TrackMania Wiki

This short help article will guide you through the process of how to edit an existing article on the wiki.

First step[edit]

There is only one requirement for editing an article: that you are logged in. You must log in using the same account you use on the TeamLiquid.net website, if you don’t already have one you can register for an account here. Then you can edit any article on the wiki by using the “Edit” buttons. At the top of the page, this button lets you edit the whole page. At the top of a section or subsection, it lets you edit that part of the page only, this can be found at the right of any header.

The editing interface[edit]

The preview is available at the bottom of the edit page

The edit page consist of an editing textbox containing the current wikicode of the page or the section you want to edit. You can now change that code to add, remove, fix, improve something on the page. Once you made the change, you can use the "Show preview" button to see how the result will look like, before you actually commit the change into the wiki. If at some point you become lost in your modifications, you can use the button Show change, that will display what you have done so far. Once you are done and satisfied with the result, you can click on “Save changes” to commit your work into the wiki.

{{Templates}}[edit]

To help you with formatting, some work has already been done by contributors who created templates. A template, in the wiki context, is a preformatted way to output information which is sometimes changed based on further input. By using template, you don’t have to care about formatting the data yourself, and it makes it easy to have a consistent way of layouting information across the wiki. Templates look like this in the wiki code:

{{Infobox player
|name=
|id=
|image
|birth_date=
|country=
|race=
|team=
|history=
|twitter=
|facebook=
|youtube=
|twitch=
...
}}

Templates may seem hard to use at first glance, but you can learn quickly by looking at other pages that use templates, and compare the wiki code that contains a template and what it shows on the page to get an idea of what are expected in the template parameters. Templates usually have a documentation page, that can be found on the wiki by going to the template page. This documentation describes what the template does, which parameters it needs or accepts, and how it looks once rendered on the page. A link to all templates used on a page is listed if you click on the preview button below the editing field, which ease the access to the documentation of the templates you are using.

A good example of a template you will often encounter is the Infobox template, which comes in three flavour: player, team, league. All it does is displaying informations in a box located at the top right of the page. It is usually present on each player, tournament, and team page, and accept multiple parameters, for example “name”, or “image”, that expect a specific value. Most of the time, it expect some text or a number that will be displayed as is, like “name”. Sometimes though, the parameter expects something specific, like “image” which expect the name of a file that has been uploaded on the wiki. That means you have to do a bit of research to understand what kind of value a specific parameter expects.

<references />[edit]

The concept behind a wiki is that anyone can edit and/or create pages on it. Sources are what makes it reliable and trustworthy. So be sure to actually provide a link that readers can consult if they want to check that the information is actually true. Though not everything can be sourced, the basic requirement is that you provide, for anything that can have one, a link to a trustworthy source, like the studio that develops the game, a very well established news website, the teams’ websites, etc. Just like in real life, when you say something, people are more likely to believe you if you have a good source to back your statement.

Formatting[edit]

You might want to edit a page to change its content, but sometimes you also want to edit a page to change its formatting. To achieve that, you have two possibilities:

  • Use the toolbar at the top of the editing textbox, which contains a lot of useful tools to format your text, add lists, headings, etc.
  • Directly format the content using wikicode, which is what the toolbar does for you automatically (you can find more about this here: MediaWiki Formatting )

General guidelines[edit]

When editing, you should keep in mind a few guidelines:

  • When in doubt: do as the wikis do, it is better to have consistent pages across the wiki.
  • Search for templates: there is no point in reinventing the wheel, and that complicated task you are struggling to do may have a corresponding template already there and way easier to use
  • Ask for help: Liquipedia has its Discord Server, which is always active (though more likely at EU hours), and there are people here that will gladly answer all your questions. And there is always the feedback thread on TeamLiquid.net