Help:Getting Started and Making a Player Character Page

So you want to put your character onto the Celestial Compass Wiki? That's great! We're glad to have you and we're glad you chose us.

First off, let's define a few things. Celestial Compass Wiki is mostly admined and moderated by solely Koi, but with some help by others, if there are any issues, talk to Koi (Myself) and me and you can work together to sort things out! I'm pretty open and flexible to things, and I'm very leaniant. I will mostly come to you if I have an issue aswell! I'd reccomend being in the discord to do this, as then we can chat quicker and easier than other methods. (https://discord.gg/kzrYXj4y)

Secondly, Although I have some standards upon what normal wiki pages should look like, and the detail and fidelity of what they should be like, what's on your character pages is entirely up to you. I may come through and do some spelling adjustments and grammar, but if you leave a comment (using the <!-- --> html tags) at the top stating, "Do not touch!" I'll honour that, so don't worry.

I also will be outlining here what you could and should include, in terms of importance, there are some things that will be very important to the page displaying and functioning like a normal page, and other things that are entirely optional and that you don't need to include if you don't want to. I'll try to be upfront with that.

So without further ado, let's get started!

Step 1: Signing up for an account.

On the default theme for this Mediawiki, there should be a little person-shaped icon in the bottom left corner, if you click it, it should bring up a menu that has a bright blue band at the bottom that says 'Log in' and above it says 'Create Account', you're going to want to click 'Create Account'.

From there, you're going to want to enter a username, password, and have an email adress and real name. I suggest you don't use a real name, as this is mainly an internet roleplaying thing and not a Super Serious Wiki, but I suggest maybe putting in a name that I (Koi) or others in these circles might identify you by, for instance, if your usual username is IncomingTransmission, but I mostly know you as Iza or Izayoi, set your 'Real Name' to Izayoi.

Disclaimer, I can't see your passwords, I don't know what you've put there, it's not stored in plain text, but I reccomend you pick one that isn't related to other passwords, just incase.

Once you have an account, we move on to step 2.

Step 2: Making the page.

Alrighty, you've got your account, you're hopefully signed in and ready to go, right, now what? Now, you make your character page. There's probably a better way to do it than my way, and if you're more familliar with how Mediawiki works, you can do it in a way that's more efficent, but if you don't know how, I suggest this method.

Searching the name you intend to use as the character page title. For Example, if you are infact Izayoi, and you want to make a character for Gansetseg Oronir, you would search 'Gansetseg Oronir' into the search bar. Yes the whole name, it's very important to be able to link to your page, and search for it later.

If it comes up with 'There were no results matching the query.' and 'Create the page "Name" on this wiki!" Great! That's the intended result. Click the red text.

You should be led to a page that says 'Creating (Name you chose) ' that's great. Keep this page open, we're going to move on to step 3.

Step 3: Opening Paragraph

So, you've got this big white blob of a page in front of your face and you're not sure what to do. Well, we should probably start with an introduction. I'd advise writing a small paragraph explaining who your character is and what they do. Specifically what you put here is up to you, if you've already got something written on another site you can copy and paste it over, but if you don't have any ideas or anything to copy and paste, you can follow this rough template.

(Character) is an (Age) (Race/Subrace) who is a (What they do for an occupation, or the first thing people will know them for) . They were (Born/Raised) in (Place) and currently are (whatever they're currently doing, or working on, or where they're currently living).

It's not much, but it'll get you past that first step of having words on a page, and that's important. Now we'll move on to the next step.

Step 4: Saving your Page

This is pretty simple, you want to press the Blue 'Save Changes' button, and you'll be taken to what your page looks like. You'll probably want to do this frequently throughout this process as you'll want to see how things look. A general rule of thumb would be to save after each Step/Section. Once you've saved you can re-enter the page with the 'Edit' button.

Step 5: Understanding the Formatting

If you're new to Mediawiki or sites like Wikipedia you may not fully understand the way that pages on these types are sites are formatted, that's okay. I'll outline some of the key points here so when I mention things later you'll understand them better.

Headings

Headings and subheadings work in a stacked format, usually following this format:

== Heading 1: A major Heading ==
=== Heading 2: A subheading to the above ===
====  Heading 3: These will nest underneath eachother ====
===== Heading 4: This goes on... =====

So in the context we currently have it, you can use it like:

[Opening Paragraph]

== Appearance ==

== History ==

=== Early Life ===
=== Teenage Years ===
=== Fall of Dalamud ===
=== Etc. ===

== Other Parts ==

The headings will automatically create a small table of contents and provide links for people to skip to, and so the way it's formatted might be something to adjust and test to how you personally see fit and what works for your character.

You can see example of how the finished titles will look by looking to the right of this page! The steps are organized as main headings with subheadings for specific parts. You can also scroll it to see more links.

Links

Within Mediawiki there are two main types of links, Internal links and External links. They have similarities, but they are formatted differently.

Internal (Interwiki) Links

Internal links are links that lead to pages that exist on the wiki. My end goal is to have both lore-pages, fan lore, and character pages on this wiki, and Internal links help achieve a flow between the pages so that someone can easily reference venues, races, beasts or other characters.

The formatting for internal links require that you place a [[ and ]] between the word, these links are case sensitive and require the exact name of the page you wish to link to. For example, for the Steppe, you'd want to link to [[The Azim Steppe]] and will appear as The Azim Steppe however, you can rename the link to fit other contexts by using a | seperator. This is applied like: [[ The Azim Steppe| Steppe]] and will appear as Steppe. Spaces do not matter here, the wiki will interpret the code either way.

External Links

External links are links that reach outside the wiki. To format an External Link you put just [ and ] around your link, and then but the text you'd like to use at the end, for example: Celestial Compass Free Company and it should appear like this: Celestial Compass Free Company if you do not put any text after your link it will appear as just a number like this: [1] which is bad practice.

Step 6: The Infobox Template.

In order to relay quick and easy information to whoever's reading your page, we're going to use what's called an 'Infobox', it's basically a little box that gives quick stats, like a top-trumps card.

To be honest with you, most of this is already done, and I've made a template to make it easier for you, the layman, to do this, instead of seeing and struggling with the code that I did. (Having a template also means that it's standardised, and everyone has the same information for easy comparison.)

Part A : Inserting the Infobox

You can copy and paste this template into your newly-created page, and you'll be good, but you can also find it again by searching Template: Infobox Player Character into the search box. It's specifically the 'Player Character' one, as others are used elsewhere in the wiki.

{{Infobox Player Character
| Name = 
| Image = [[File: ]]
| Race = 
| Gender = 
| Clan = 
| Nameday = 
| Died = 
| Birthplace =
| Homeland = 
}}

You will want to put the Infobox at the TOP of your page, so that it is seen first by the wiki software.

Part B : Filling out the Infobox

Now, as long as I haven't updated this template and not this guide and made everything obsolete, the template should be working. Now, what to we put into the Infobox? It seems simple, but like hear me out, as some things work a little odd because of functioning links and stuff.

Name

This one is pretty simple, arguably the simplest. You just need to put in your name, I'd advise in putting the name people will most likely recognise your character as, and some form of First name and Last name if they're a humanoid being within a culture that has that. I know there's some edge cases, like for instance Side-Characters or Companions such as Chewy, Tulatha, Lacy, Paz, etc. that's fine, but for humans, you most likely have a last name. Include it. If anything, for my sake.

Image

Hoo boy. Okay. So this has to be a specific way, because it's a bit of cheat to make the code in this god-forsaken wiki work, so please bear with me while I explain it. So basically in a new tab (if you haven't saved the page yet, you will loose your work if you click away) you want to navigate to the three lines (hamburger menu) on the top left and click it, then go down to Upload File. You then will... upload the file.

So, the Source File is simple, that's the file. I reccomend of a square image for this as it'll be much easier for things later, and you're going to want something bigger that 100px by 100px, but if you want to be a deep fried spec, I mean that's up to you.

Destination Filename means the file that it will become, if your source file is kgskljhlkjrsljjklh26029090.jpg, you might want to change it to GansetsegProfilePicture.jpg to find it easier and to help with the next part.

Summary and Licensing isn't fully important here, you can put notes in Summary if you want to remeber something about it, or if you want to denote that it isn't fully accurate, is temporary, or isn't canon / in character. I really don't mind what you put there, but if you don't have anything good or useful to put there, I'd advise on maybe not putting anything.

As for upload options, Watch this file means you'll get updates if someone changes the file, I like to keep this ticked so that I can check for griefing or conflicts, but that's, again, up to you. 'Ignore any warnings' should be kept blank, unless you messed up, uploaded the wrong file, and want to overwrite the one you messed up.

Once this is done, make a note of the filename, and tab back to the page you're working on. Once you're back in the saddle, you want to format it like this [[File: Name of the file and prefix you just uploaded ]] and to use our above example, should look similar in format to this [[File:GansetsegProfilePicture.jpg]]

Gender

This is the gender of your character. It's a difficult subject but I'd go with the closest word to what'd you think your character is, for most people it'll be a binary Male or Female, but for some characters you may want to denote Non-Binary or Other.

This will place your character into a category made of characters of this gender, so I'd advise following the same writing/formate as above. However, you can skip this entirely by not writing anything or write 'Unknown' or 'Other' and go into more detail in the page itself.

Race

Now, for race I've set up pages for the main races in-game which should cover most if not all cases, if you are not of the main races, then I'd try and find a page on the wiki that has your race, to use an earlier example, Sylph or Faerie for Tulatha or Carbuncle for Lacy or Paz. For this, I'd prefer you pick the race your character actually is, for example, Escher was raised by Amalj'aa and believed, for a long time that he was one, but he still was phsyically an Au Ra, so he would be denoted as Au Ra. For minions without a clear denotation just yet, such as Chewy, either put 'Minion' or leave it blank.

I'd also like to note that for this input, spelling and proper capitalisation is important as it will be linking to a wiki page, so for quick reference and also for the ease of most people using Copy and Paste :

Au Ra
Elezen
Hrothgar
Hyur
Lalafell
Miqo'te
Roegadyn
Viera

These will get linked to the pages explaining the race, and also place your character within the categories of the same race, so it's very important the spelling is standarized. Please do not pick more than one.

Subrace

This follows alot of the same requirments as above. For non-standard races that don't have subraces, just leave this blank. You don't need to put anything here. For normal player races, the subraces are as follows :

Xaela
Raen

Keeper of the Moon
Seeker of the Sun

Midlander
Highlander

Wildwood
Duskwight

Plainsfolk
Dunesfolk

Sea Wolves
Hellsguard

Rava
Veena

Helions
The Lost

For those whose subrace isn't exactly like ingame, please pick your in-game denotation for easy comparison, and please only pick one, even when two apply because otherwise it messes with the code and the categorisation.

Nameday

This is your character's birthday, If you don't know, please write 'Unknown' into this box, as if the code doesn't see anything it won't put your character into the 'Living Characters' category, when they are infact a living character.

Also, if you've forgotten, Protip, you can check your character's nameday on the lodestone.

I wouldn't put a year or an age here, I would simply put the 'x Sun of the x Umbral/Astral Moon', I will later add a age collumn, but for now, we have this.

Spelling and sorting isn't fully important here, you can just put whatever you want as long as, you put something.

Died

Okay this is just a parameter to check if the character is dead or not. If they're not dead, leave this blank, skip to the next option, if they are dead, you can put the year the died, or the word 'Deceased' or even just 'Yup' the wiki doesn't care, it just wants to see something to categorise your character as dead.

DO NOT ENTER ANYTHING FOR THIS IF YOUR CHARACTER ISN'T DEAD.

Birthplace

This seems self explaniatory, and it is, but there's some specifics to it that help the sorting. Firstly, the scale of it is up to you. If they came from the Steppe, put the The Azim Steppe, if they came from Sharlayan, put Sharlayan.

This will link to a page, so if you're unsure, try looking up the place and seeing if we have no page for it, you can still type something and it'll come up as red text, don't worry about it, just tell Koi and she'll add it to the list of places to get around to.

Don't worry too hard of the scope of this, but try to stick to ingame places if you can. Such as North Shroud or Gridania or Ishgard, or such. If it isn't an ingame place, you can choose to make the place yourself, but that's a seperate tutorial I haven't made yet, so just leave it blank for now.

You can leave this blank and it won't appear.

Homeland

Okay, for this I'm generally looking for the City-State OR Region your character is from, and/or considers their home. So, Ishgard, Coerthas, Kugane, Hingashi, Sharlayan, La Noscea, Limsa Lominsa, etc. Basically where your character comes from / grew up in.

Again, this can be skipped by not putting anything, but if you do, please be aware of spelling as it will create a link.

Step 7. Search Engine Optimisation Metadata

DO NOT SKIP THIS. At the bottom of each page you want to put the SEO Metadata using this template.

{{#seo:
|title= 
|title_mode=replace
|description= 
|image=
}}

It's pretty simple, but I'll explain it.

Title

Title is the title of the page in your browser and the title that appears when it is linked on Discord, since it's set to replace, whatever you put into it will be only that. A good rule of thumb is to use the same title as what you did with the page above.

Description

This will show up when someone links the page in discord so just, write a quick, one-sentance summary of your character. Specifically how this is written it up to you, but if you need a rough guideline, '(Character) is an (age) (race/subrace) from (homeland).' is a good option.

Image

Technically, you can place any image here and it'll appear as the image when linked elsewhere, but for ease of use I recommend just using the same image that you used in the 'Infobox' portion of this tutorial. That way if you overwrite and update the file you used in the Infobox, it will also update this one.

Step 6. Done?

I believe we're done, hit save and see how it looks. From here, you're on your own, but contact Koi if you need help.