Sunday, May 31, 2009

I Say, Embrace Your Inner Wikia!

So, I've never worked on a wiki before. EVER. I've never contributed one ounce . . . until today. I decided today to conquer my unnatural fear of wikis by adding to the wonderful Wizard101 Wikia. One reader of The Friendly Necromancer, Matthew Willowblossom (He also goes by the name "Potroast" over on the wikia), is one of the admins of the site and seems to be a great guy.

I say let's join Matthew, EMBRACE WIKIA MY FRIENDS! Yes, kind readers, let us embrace this wonderful resource and make it "some kind of wonderful" for all the players yet to come. We NEED to embrace this. Seriously, if you have gone through the game once with a character and are questing through the game a second time, you have no reason to not help out with building this site after today. Got it? Good.

So, with that said, I would like to unveil a little of what I worked on today at Wikia. Here's how it played out . . . .

I was looking at the Dragonspyre portion of Wikia, and I noticed just how sparse it really was. There's the entrance area of Dragonspyre and a couple other zones . . . and then that's it. Well, my son's and daughter's characters just happen to be in the third area of the Atheneum, The Grand Chasm.

So, while I was playing today I opened up Microsoft Word and decided to keep track of a couple quests I was running.

So I did . . . and this is what I wrote down.
Level 45 quest

Crystal crawlers are rank 8 ice wizards

1270 hit points

cast: Tower shield
Ice elf
Ice blade
Ice trap
Ice wyvern

They wander with rank 7 death wizards named “undead wizard”
cast: Ghoul
Vampire

Edrik tells you the one you collected was not perfect but it will do.

1550 exp for completing the quest

Follow up quest is called Charged up

------------
Charged up

Edrik wants you to go talk to Belia Windgazer to get admittance to the vaults.

She says “You want admittance into Edrik Scatterglow’s valut? Normally, that would require three signatures, but considering the circumstances . . .”

“Here’s the key to Edrik Scatterglow’s vault . . . no signature required! Get Edrik Scatterglow’s charger from Valut D on Floor 8”


315 exp
108 gold

Follow on quest is “Just Charge it”

------
Just Charge it


I then went to Wikia and discovered that I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I read the help file. I read the help file's help file. I read the help file of the help file's help file. I still couldn't figure out what the heck I was supposed to do. Then that Dragonspyre Brazier went off in my head, OK, I need to create a page for The Grand Chasm since there wasn't one created for it yet, THEN, I could enter in my quest information.

Then I decided . . . well, why recreate the wheel? Right? I mean, if the work of setting up a new zone page has already been done by someone else, why not copy and paste it into the one that *I* want to do. So I went into the Wizard City file, clicked "edit this page," and copied the code information for Unicorn Way, which looked like this.


[[Image:UnicornWayStatue.png|thumb|left]]


'''Unicorn Way''' is the location of the first line of main quests. It has recently become plagued by corrupted [[Dark Fairy|Dark Fairies]] and various Undead. Here, the player must, amongst other things, discover the reason behind the corruption of the fairies and help clear away some of the Undead from the streets.


==Map==
[[Image:UnicornWay.png]]

==NPCS==
:[[Ceren Nightchant]]
:[[Private Connelly]]
:[[Ugo Kalahad]]
:[[Olivia Dawnwillow]]
:[[Diego the Duelmaster]]

==Creatures==
:[[Lost Soul]]
:[[Dark Fairy]]
:[[Fairy Queen]]
:[[Skeletal Pirate]]

==Places Of Interest==
:[[Dorothy Gale's House]]
:[[Lady Blackhope's Tower]]
:[[Rattlebones Tower]]
:[[Hedge Maze]]
:[[Arena]]

==Connects To==
:[[Commons]]

Then I hopped over to the red link (that means a page isn't built for that area yet) for The Grand Chasm and pasted the Unicorn Way code into the Grand Chasm code. Then it was as simple as deleting all the NPCs, connecting areas, etc. of Unicorn way and then filling in the NPCs, connecting areas, etc. of The Grand Chasm. Then, I clicked the upload picture file button and uploaded the map I had snapped a screenshot of. And for a finishing touch, I even made a cool banner for the page. (hehe, I took liberties and put "The Friendly Necromancer" on the map and included Amber Deathsong on the banner graphic . . . hope that's ok . . . it should be! Stuff like that will make people want to fill in the wikia so they get their character's name seen!)

The result looks like THIS: CLICK ME!

Awesome, ain't it? Now all I'll have to do from now on is have Wikia up in the background as I quest with my kids' characters and fill in all the red links as I go through the following zones. By the time my kids have plowed through this content, I'm hoping I will have helped this Wikia grow and thereby helped out every single following person who wants to know about this stuff . . . UNLESS YOU BEAT ME TO IT! And believe me, I don't think the admin of the Wikia site will object at all if everyone pitches in and builds a grand wiki for all Wizard101 players to use.

There's still a TON more I need to understand about our Wikia, but at least I'm on the road here, right? RIGHT!

I hope you all catch the fire of this, and as I update the Wizard101 Wikia, I hope you all will join me to make it a great resource. NAY, I'm counting on all of you to jump in and help this site become awesome. Wizard101 is too great of a game to allow our wiki to have big holes in it like this. Pitch in, and let's make OUR WIKIA golden.

Happy Dueling!

11 comments:

Matthew Willowblossom said...

Hey Friendly,

Thanks again for the contributions, but technically I am not the main admin of the site, just the most active one. The main admin is Jaycee27, but due to circumstances, which I don't know exactly what they are, she (or he) is currently absent, only making occasional edits.

Matthew Willowblossom
--Potroast42

Stingite said...

Gotcha! All fixed now so that you're not listed as "thee" main admin.

Thanks for all you do, Matthew!

L. R. Jonté said...

That is a nice looking wiki page! I applaud you, sir!

Cheyenne Darkwhisper said...

Well Thomas, I looked at the Wiki page you created, very nice, but I really don't understand this site at all! Its so confusing! I click on one area, and I can read a bit, but I don't know how to contribute anything. So...confusing...

Matthew Willowblossom said...

Hi Cheyenne,

Just a tip to get you started on the wiki. The first step is to just make an account and I'll be able to help you from there. You should be able to get the hang of things fairly quickly because if I can figure it out you should be able to.

Matthew Willowblossom
--Potroast42

Stingite said...

Thank you, Thank you . . . no applause, just throw money!

Angie said...

Hey, I work for Wikia and came across your post! Thanks for making such a solid contribution. I also loved hearing your play by play of figuring out how to edit a wiki. We are tying to make it easier and hearing which parts are confusing is really helpful. If you have any other feedback along the way OR questions please feel free to leave a message on my talk page!

http://wikia.com/wiki/User_talk:Angies

Stingite said...

Will do, Angie! Templates . . . it's the way to go.

Cheyenne Darkwhisper said...

Well, made an account, but I still don't understand much ^^

Matthew Willowblossom said...

Finally after 23 edits I got Cheyenne's userpage up and running.

tiringPS. Cheyenne may be able to make signatures, but she is definitely challenged when it comes to wikia.

Cheyenne Darkwhisper said...

Haha, took a LONG time. But thanks Matthew for putting up with my stupidity ^^

Yeah... I am so computer challenged its not even funny! >< He made my page all nice and I added 2 things and screwed it up. Sorry for the hassle Matthew!