Help:Editing manual

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BG3Wiki is a collaborative, living project created and maintained by community volunteers. Anyone can edit and contribute to BG3Wiki, no sign-up necessary!

Don't be afraid to contribute – if you want to test the waters, you can access your personal sandbox to experiment in by clicking Here.

For guidelines, you can at any time consult the Editing Policy or the Style Guide, but this is not required to get started!

The basics

Creating an account

Creating an account is an optional but recommended step. Editing using an account attributes wiki edits to your account. You can edit pages without an account, but your IP address will be publicly logged.

Sandboxes

Click Here to create your personal sandbox page. You can use this to learn how to edit, or simply to experiment. You are free to edit this page as much as you wish, it is disconnected from the rest of the wiki.

Discussion pages

An article's Discussion page, or Talk Page is used to settle disagreements about an article. Use an article's Discussion page to discuss the article's contents and edits. Sign your comments using ~~~~.

Discord

We recommend you join the BG3Wiki Discord to discuss wiki editing with other contributors. This is completely optional, but be aware many decisions are taken during live discussions, even though we recommend the use of the Discussion page for most content articles.

Page history

Click the View history button above a page to see a history of edits performed on that page. Each line describes a revision of the page, including date/time, the contributor who made that edit, and (ideally) the reason for the edit. This can be helpful if you're not sure why an edit was made.

The editors

To edit an existing page, click either Edit (opens Visual Editor) or Edit source (opens Source Editor) above the page. Within either editor view, you can switch between the Visual Editor and the Source Editor at any time via the upper-right menu button.

When you've finished editing, feel free to add a brief Summary of your changes and click the Save changes button!

Visual Editor and Source Editor buttons
Switching between editor types
  • The Visual Editor is helpful for contributors who are new or not yet familiar with wiki markup, but it doesn't allow you to directly manipulate wiki markup.
  • The Source Editor is more powerful and flexible, but requires at least a basic understanding of wiki markup.

Categories

Example of a Category

Category pages list all the pages within that Category.

Browsing categories

The Everything search option includes Categories in the search results. You can also find them on the Special:Categories page. Categories can prove useful when looking for a specific image or page, particularly when you don't know the exact name of the thing you're looking for.

Adding a page to a category

Adding Categories in the Visual Editor

Some templates will automatically add the correct category to the page it is used on. However, in some cases, you'll want to manually add pages to additional categories.

To add a page to a category:

  • When using the Visual Editor, you can add a page to a category by clicking on the upper-right menu and selecting Categories. Start typing a category name in the provided box, and the editor will suggest autocomplete options for the category, if any exist.
  • When using the Source Editor, use the markup [[Category:Name of category here]] at the bottom of the page. You can repeat this as many times as needed for additional Categories.

Templates

A Template is a special type of page designed to be included within other pages. Templates are often used as 'shorthand' to automatically insert frequently-used images, code, and formatting on a page. We use templates extensively on bg3.wiki.

See the Template Quick Reference for an overview of the most commonly-used templates.

Other namespaces

There are other types of pages that use different guidelines and principles than the rest of the wiki.

Guides

The Guide namespace is where users can create and edit guides on BG3Wiki.

To create a Guide, simply start an article name with Guide:. For example, Guide:How to use torches.

Modding

The Modding namespaces is all about modding, such as how to create and use mods.

To create a Modding page, simply start an article name with Guide:. For example, Modding:How to use mods.

Additional resources