Welcome to Cities Wiki!
The accompanying talk page is one good place for discussion of the wiki. Please post your ideas for good things we can do to improve this site.
Where to start[]
First see if your town is listed. Add a page if it is not.
The red links or question marks that you will see on many pages usually stand for articles or pages that deserve to be written but that nobody has started on. Just click on a link you know something about and write a couple of sentences, then "Save page" (preferably after a look using "Show preview"), that would be a good start and might inspire others to join in.
To "fix" the red links on as many pages as possible, find a wanted page and create an article that is currently a "dead-end" link on more than one page.
Improvements wanted[]
All of the 1,170 articles already written need improvement. See, for example, a list of the shortest articles. Anyone who has a Wikia account, possibly including you, can help.
Current improvement drives[]
All colon subpages (subpages using a colon instead of a slash) shall be replaced with slash subpages. For example, Chichawatni:Families must be replaced with Chichawatni/Families.
How to edit[]
See Help:Editing.
You can start right in (and someone else will be able to improve it if necessary).
Experimenting[]
If you want to experiment with editing, play in the sandbox for a while until you are familiar with the basics.
Other points[]
Registering costs nothing except a few moments of your time; and it carries some advantages:
- You get credit (in the page histories, which can be viewed even if the article is later changed) for anything you write.
- You are more anonymous because your IP number is not shown.
- you can keep personal "quick links" and "to do" lists on your userpage and get to it with one click from any other page.
- You can very quickly add your signatures by typing four tildes (
~~~~
). - You can edit, because starting July 2015, Cities Wiki requires all contributors to log in.
If registered, you may go to commons:Commons:Babel to find how easy it is to display babels.
Each article and each userpage has a corresponding talk page.
Note that starting a line with a blank produces an unexpected display, which has its uses but is seldom ideal in ordinary text, like this:
Example
Familiar with Wikipedia?[]
Much of the foregoing will be familiar to you.
Categories[]
We have (in common with Wikipedia and other MediaWiki sites) categories coded as "[[Category:Category name]]
". It's very useful as indirect links to articles that have something in common. Every city or town page should have the city and/or country as a category.
Subpages[]
Every city can/should have "subpages". They can follow the Wikipedia style, eg "Music in Bloggsville"; however, the preferred form is "Bloggsville/Music", which has at least two advantages: it's quicker to type, it collects all together in any list of all pages, and you can more easily create piped internal links to other subpages of the same city without having to have the city name showing, eg "the city's [[Bloggsville/Music|]]
scene" should display as "the city's music scene" with "music" the link.
Each of them should have the city as a category and maybe the subject-matter too.
Images[]
If you are even half competent with images, please grab some from Commons or elsewhere (suitably acknowledged) to illustrate some of our pages.
References[]
Naming conventions[]
The names of pages in Cities Wikia should be in sentence-case. Also, use the name used in Wikipedia, if it has a page on Wikipedia.