Common Actions

Some things that you might want to do that are not exactly usefully documented in the official help.

Renaming Pages/Categories (aka Moving Pages)

Technically, you can't actually rename a page or category, but in practice you can, it just takes a few steps. What you are essentially doing is (optionally) moving the existing contents of the page/category (including categories to which it belongs, in the case of pages and subcategories) to a new page with a new name, and then deleting the old category. If you are 'renaming' a category that has already had pages added to it, you (unfortunately) have to then manually fix the subpages (or at least if there's a way to automate that, I haven't found it yet).

Here is how you do it:

1. Go to the page or category that you want to fix. For example, if someone made the page or category "Hroses" and you want to fix the typo to Horses, you would go to the "Hroses" page or category.
2. In the upper right of the page, Select More and then Move. This will take you to the Move page.
3. On the Move page, select a namespace. This will default to the namespace of the thing you're moving, so if you're moving a page it will be (Main), if you're moving a category it will be Category, and so on. Usually you will want to leave this alone and not touch it unless you're doing something complicated.
4. Next to the namespace, type the new name. In the above example, you would type "Horses."
   Important: If the page you are moving to already exists, the move will overwrite the destination page with the source page. This means that if the page already exists and you don't want to overwrite it--i.e., if Horses already existed and had useful content--you would not want to move the page. In this case, copy any existing text that you want to keep from the Source page (Hroses) and then manually add it to Horses (if there isn't any, this obviously isn't necessary). Then skip to step 7 to delete the misnamed page. (This isn't a huge deal as moves can be undone, and the wiki will warn you if you try, but it's worth bearing in mind.)
5. For the other settings, the defaults are usually fine. (You can uncheck 'leave a redirect behind' if you won't want it to create a redirect, but if you're deleting the page anyway it doesn't really matter.)
6. What happens next depends on whether you're renaming a page or a category:
7. If you're renaming a category, you will need to relink all of the pages/subcategories that the category contains to the new category. (If you leave the redirect in place, you don't actually have to do this as the redirect will fix it for you, but you might want to.) You can do this right away by opening them up before you delete the page, or by going to Special:WantedCategories and then remove the old category from the pages and add the new one. Then proceed to the deletion step. If you're renaming a page, skip this step.
8. Deleting the page depends on whether you have delete rights or not. If you do, go back to the source page (Hroses), select More and then select Delete. You'll be prompted to confirm and provide a reason. If you don't have the delete right, ask someone to help.

Citations

Preliminary note: Citations don't need to be complete; book or book and chapter is fine. Page numbers should refer to the paperbacks, not the ebook-generated count.

To create a citation, there are two steps. First, in the main body of the text, use the <ref> tags to surround the citation, immediately adjacent to what you're citing. For example:

Glaseah have ears.<ref>A Jaguar Book, chapter 4</ref> Humans also have ears but they're less fancy.<ref>A Jaguar Book With Humans, chapter 2 </ref>

If you want the resulting citation list to appear in a specific section (like a Notes section), add the following at the bottom of the page:

<references />

(It will still work if you leave off but it will stick it at the bottom of the page.)

The above would make something that looks like this:

Glaseah have ears. Humans also have ears but they're less fancy.

A Short Guide to Links

To make a basic link to something in the wiki, just put the page name in two square brackets, like so: [[Alliance]]. It will look like this: Alliance. If you want to name or format it somewhat differently, you can do so like this "The Queen Ransomed is a [[Chatcaava | chatcaavan]] winged female. That would render as this: "The Queen Ransomed is a chatcaavan winged female."

For long pages, you may find it useful to be able to link to a specific subheading. For instance, if you wanted to link to the Alliance's history and not make people go to that page and scroll, you could link to Alliance#History. To make this prettier, you can use a pipe as above, like so: "Read more about the [[Alliance#History | history of the Alliance]]." That will render like this: "Read more about the history of the Alliance."

To link to an external page, do this: [https://mcahogarth.org/ Studio MCAH]

There are a lot more things you can do with links, but that's the basics. More here: Help on Links at mediawiki.org

Creating a Redirect

If you move a page and don't delete the page it came from (see #Renaming Pages/Categories (aka Moving Pages)) it will automatically create a redirect unless you tell it not to. If you want to manually create a redirect on a new or empty page without moving it, you can