Manual of Style

Welcome to the TT-Wiki Manual of Style. Here you can learn what style to use when editing articles.

Use of "Preview"

Always use the Preview feature to check on your edits before committing them. Do lots of edits and then save, not lots of saves while you edit.

To find out what markup you can use in addition to the stuff available from the sidebar and Editing help when editing, see the Wikipedia Cheatsheet page for now, which is the MediaWiki syntax and formatting help page. New pages specific to [Main_Page|The Transport Tycoon Wiki] will be created and linked in future.

Use of the Summary field

When editing a page, put something helpful in the "Summary" field (when you go to make an edit, it's directly beneath the big edit box) to make it easier for all concerned to see who did what at-a-glance. The idea for the comments list is that someone can look at a version comment, and establish without having to look at individual diffs and comparisons to see what changed between versions. It also facilitates transparency, one of the great benefits of wikis.

Examples of useful comments:

Fixed some typos. (Tells us what you did)

Expanded upon first paragraph. (Tells us where you did it)

Removed obsolete information about Thisthat & Theother, plc. (Does exactly what it says on the tin)

Updated revision dates. (Brief, but hopefully there won't be much of those on the given page to be updated)

Examples of not-so-useful comments:

           (Empty comment - people have to check the diffs for each version)

Written by xyz. (You don't say? It's not as if the "history" list already shows who wrote it ...)

Added more information. (Oh, well isn't that helpful? Tells everything doesn't it?)

Be warned - if you do not include a useful comment with an edit, that page may be rolled back and your edit undone.

Updating pages from TTDPatch Wiki

Pages imported from the TTDPatch Wiki will often be in bad shape. In tidying them up, we recommend the following actions be taken:

• Remove the "strapline" (typically the first line) which was used in TikiWiki for a page description. This is generally redundant.
• Remove the page header. Again, this is redundant.
• Replace any instances of " " or """ with normal spaces and quotes, unless required for formatting reasons.
• Migrate wikicode.
• Add categories (typically, add all pages to the TTDPatch category, and add a general category for each section (e.g., Introduction, Usage, Patches, etc)
• Fix links - TikiWiki would automatically wikify CamelCase links. We have to explicitly create links. All links with a text similar to [1] should have their own link text, not a sequential Wiki-generated link ID. [Please not that outside links and text to be displayed are seperated by a space (0x20), whereas links within the Wiki and the link text are seperated by a pipe (0x7c).]

In the future, the intention will also be to mass rename pages to remove the ugly CamelCase. It'll be easier to do it all at once and send a bot to go and rename all the links, though, rather than trying to do it manually.

For more complex pages, you may wish to use this script with this data file to try to tidy up the page first.

Always compare the page against the original page on the old wiki to ensure all content is transferred. Pictures will need to be re-uploaded.

Ideally it'd be good to add some better navigation features to manual pages, similar to those you may see on Wikipedia or the OpenTTD wiki (infoboxes, etc).

Links

• Use Template:grfspecs for links to the GRFSpecs Wiki.