UESPWiki:For Dummies

The UESPWiki – Your source for The Elder Scrolls since 1995

Welcome to the UESP for Dummies article. This is probably your last, desperate, and final attempt to learn how to edit for the UESP. By you reading this, we can guess with some certainly the following assumptions about you:

• You like to write. Although you may not be able to write an essay about the effects of historic Kansas in the present day United States, you know how to write about things that you like.
• You're pretty knowledgeable with one of the Elder Scrolls games. You probably have beaten that game, if not completed. You're pretty good at that game. You can help others who are struggling with the game and give them pointers.
• You know that HTML has something to do with how websites are built.
• You want to know how to participate with building our project, in either a minor or a major way.

Contents 1 How to edit in three very simplified steps 2 How to edit in a constructive way 3 How to add Links 4 How to add tables 5 What to do

[edit] How to edit in three very simplified steps

Main article: Help:Editing Pages

Editing a page is very easy. Simply follow the three steps below:

1. Click on the edit button on the top of the page
2. Type something into the big box that somehow modifies the text (hence, editing)
3. Put something that tells what you did in the little box below the big box
4. Click on the little Show preview button and see if everything is okey-dokey
5. Click on the bold "Save page" button

Unfortunately, life is never as easy as this, and editing our project is a little more complicated than what I described above. You can't put nonsense on a page, or else someone will be mad at you! We create pages to share information with others, and not to test our skills. There is one magical place, however, where you can go and no one will be mad if you blank the page and use it like a scratchpad: The sandbox!

[edit] How to edit in a constructive way

Now that you've learned how to operate the biggest and most dangerous feature on this wiki, let's see if we can put you to use. When you edit a page, your doing it because you have something to add. You want to correct a typo, or maybe you want to clarify the structure of a paragraph. Maybe someone wrote something entirely in l33t sp33k, and you can translate it into English. Whatever the case, you should ask yourself one basic question before saving the page:

Is my edit going to improve upon the quality of the UESP?

Some more advanced questions you can ask yourself:

Is my edit free of first person and attribution?

Does my edit relate to the topic at hand?

Does my edit provide factual information in an easy-to-read manner?

Once you ask yourself these questions and are sure of your edit, you are ready to save. Just remember to preview!

[edit] How to add Links

Main Article: Help:Links

Now for a helpful, but easy to screw up, thing to do on the wiki. Adding Links. But links are very sensitive. If you mess up one thing, they will end up Like this. See what happened? The link turned all ugly and red.

To make a link:

1. Make Brackets, like this [[]]
2. Then put a page name in the brackets [[UESPWiki:For Dummies]]
3. Now put a |, and name your link [[UESPWiki:For Dummies|You Are Here]]
4. When you preview, make sure you don't have a red link
5. If you do have a red link, double check your spelling.
6. If the page doesn't exist, don't delete the link, keep it, maybe someone will make it.

Great! Now that we know linking, we can turn a bland, boring page into an blue colored encyclopedia of gaming knowledge!

[edit] How to add tables

Main Article: Help:Tables

One of the hardest things you can do is tables. They require a lot of thinking, and are very, very very easy to mess up.

Here is the code for a table:

{| class="wikitable" ! First Column !! Second Column |- | A cell || Another cell |- | More || ...and more |}

When you type it in, it will look like this:

First Column	Second Column
A cell	Another cell
More	...and more

Follow these steps to make a table:

1. Add a {| on a blank line
2. On the same line, put your table class, see the Help:Tables page for the all of the classes
3. Use exclamation marks (!) and put in words to make your headers
4. Put a |- to make a new line
5. Put a |, and put words under your header
6. Repeat the last two steps until you're happy

That's it! If you ever need to make a table, now you know how! But always double-check your work to make sure you did it right.

[edit] What to do

Now that you know how do do some editing, you should check out the Help:Contents page. It goes in-depth about everything we covered and more. You can also go to the Task List, or practice in the Sandbox. And if you ever forget something, don't be worried to look it up. Congratulations on passing the UESPWiki:For Dummies page!