Because anyone can edit the Sartorias-deles wiki, there are certain guidelines in place to help facilitate the collaboration. Their purpose is simply to help make the wiki a comprehensive, coherent, and reliable source of information, as well as to promote civility and respect for other editors and readers. Keep in mind, though, that these guidelines are very general, and it is not mandatory for anyone to read them before beginning to edit. Moreover, none of these guidelines are hard set rules. They can be "broken" and just as any other part of this wiki, they may be changed at ay time. But it would be advisable for editors to have at the very least a general idea of these guidelines and to try to follow them whenever possible.

Guest Editors

This website is, first and foremost, a wiki. According to Wikipedia, the king of all wikis, a wiki is "a collaborative website which can be edited by anyone with access to it." The more people contribute to this website, the better, larger and more complete the S-d wiki becomes. Therefore, everyone is encouraged to edit any article in any way that they feel would improve it, no matter how little experience they have with editing wikis or how little they feel they know about Sartorias-deles.

However, due to sensitive copyright laws and general security concerns, you must obtain a special password in order to be able to edit any articles. Also, as it is too burdensome to run a registration system, only regular contributors will have accounts, and any guests must edit under the username editedby using the special password found here (Note: You must have a LiveJournal account and be a member of the Athanarel community to see the post. Creating an LJ account is free). Since the guest system is general and prevents contributors from signing their name, please sign your contribution. To do this, choose a username that you will use every time you edit the s-d wiki. Then, when editing, type that username in the "Summary:" box below the main editing box. You should write your username first, before writing the reason for your edit.

Spoiler Protocol

A spoiler is a piece of information that reveals plot events or twists of a book or any other narrative work. Many people do not like knowing the ending of a book before they read it, and editors should be sensitive to this while editing the s-d wiki. Please use the following guidelines:

• If a spoiler is only a few sentences long and does not constitute a majority of the article or section within that article, please write Spoiler: and "white-out" the spoiler by changing the color of the spoiler text to white. It should look like this when you type it:

This sentence contains no spoilers. %red%'''''Spoiler: '''''%% %white% However, 
this sentence "spoils" the end of the book.%% The rest of the article contains
no more spoilers.

• If an entire article contains spoilers throughout, please label it with Note: Contains Spoilers!. To do this, type !!%red%'''''Note: Contains Spoilers!'''''%% directly under the title or at the top of the page if there is no title.
• If just one section contains spoilers throughout, you should also label it with Contains Spoilers!. Type it directly next to the title of the section. It should look like this: !!Title of Section - %red%'''''Contains Spoilers!'''''%%.

However, while editors should attempt to warn about possible spoilers, readers must still remember that some spoilers may be unmarked. Editors may forget about spoiler warnings or may have a different idea of what constitutes a spoiler than a particular reader might. Read all articles at your own risk.

Redirects

Redirects make life a whole lot easier for other editors. Use them liberally! There are many reasons to use them, including those listed below:

• Redirects mean that editors don't have to remember the exact title of the page they are linking to. It can also save typing time. For example, both Over the Sea and CJ's First Record redirect to Over the Sea: CJ's First Record.
• Redirects help for articles on subjects that have more than one name/spelling. Hervithe and Hill Folk, for example, are the same thing, and should not link to two separate articles. However, just using one or the other can lead to confusion, or cause more work for editors if they have to remember which one was used.
• Redirects are useful to use when pages are renamed. The easiest way to rename a page is to create a new article with the new title and to copy and paste the information from the old title into the new one. But what do you do with the old one? If you simply delete it, you lose the page's history. It also breaks all the links to the old page, and it is a pain to manually change each of those links. If, on the other hand, you redirect the old page to the new one instead of deleting it, you avoid all of these problems!
• Redirects make dividing pages easier. Weddings and Marriage both redirect to Marriage and Weddings. Now, if we ever decide to make Weddings and Marriage into two separate articles, we won't have to change as many links!

Other Helpful Guidelines

• Naming Convention: When creating pages, keep in mind that if the subject is a noun, the normal procedure is to name the page using the plural form of the noun. However, as always, use your discretion. If it makes more sense to use the singular, then go ahead and do so.
• Markup Language: Please familiarize yourself with the markup language before you create or edit any articles. The software used is PmWiki--included is a Basic Editing guide and a Documentation Index for more complicated markups (especially WikiTrails and Categories). Use the WikiSandbox for testing before making any contributions.
• References: Referencing your information is a very good idea. For more information, please read the Citation Handbook.
• Footnotes: If you would like to add a footnote to an article, the easiest way is to use the '^[[#ref | #]]^' tag as if you were adding a citation. If there is a heading above the references that reads References, you may want to change that to read Footnotes instead. (See the Citation Handbook for more detailed instructions on using the ref tag.)
• Summary Box: It is very helpful if you use the "Summary:" box beneath the main editing box to briefly describe how you've changed the article. (If you are a Guest Editor, please sign your name before writing your summary.) This allows others to more easily keep track of edits to the article.
• Minor Edits: If your edit is minor and does not affect the actual content of the article (for example fixing a typo), it is also helpful if you check the box next to the words "This is a minor edit."
• Discussion: Sometimes, you may wish to discuss the contents of a specific article with other editors. Reasons for this might be that you want others to check your edits, you don't know what to do about something, or you have an idea but want to see what others think first. While the Suggestion Box may be used for this purpose, it often makes more sense to have the discussion on the same page as the article. To do this, add a horizontal line after the very end of the article, write Notes: or Discussion underneath it, and begin the discussion. Others will add their comments beneath yours. Please sign your comments using four tildes (or your name if you are a guest editor).