Help:Contents

Read on if you are interested in contributing content to the officially sanctioned website, dedicated to the award winning comic series Astro City. This input box and button provide a quick way to create a new page. Please make sure you understand the various parameters and how they work. Please check to insure the page doesn't already exist. Exact spelling is important. Changing the Default Name is also a good idea. If you need guidance, see hints and tips below.

Character Page Templates

We've got templates. Not very many, but for editing Characters, these work great. They work for Heroes and Villains (the templates signed a neutrality clause) and for now, can even be used for Teams, Civilian pages and other miscellaneous stuff. It might be a stretch to get them to work for City related pages, and until they have templates of their own, perhaps building a new City page can best be done by using an existing Landmark, Neighborhood, or other City page as a model. Plans are in place to design special templates for these other page categories as time permits. But for now think of the character templates as being generic, and use them wherever you feel you can make them work for whatever content you are doing.

A Character Page is usually constructed using the following two Character templates. In fact, for consistency across the Herocopia site, it is highly recommended to use them. With practice, you will find them very helpful and much easier than building a Character page from scratch.

• Template:Character infobox2
• Template:Character page

Each template has several parameters (all optional) that can be filled in where appropriate. It will depend on the character, how much information is available from the stories, or if the information applies. Currently two of the best examples are the Silver Agent and Astra Furst pages.

These two templates are also undergoing major editing work of their own, mainly cosmetic. But any future changes made to the templates, should not effect the outer mechanics of authors using them to construct pages. Another reason to stick with using these templates when building a character page.

See each templates' associated documentation section for more information.

General Editing Tools

Herocopia.com is a MediaWiki website. Do you want to contribute, but do not know how to edit pages? These guides might be of help.

• Wikipedia's style guidelines
• How-to... in Wikipedia
• Wikipedia's style guidelines
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting - Formatting tips

Basic Guidelines pertaining to Herocopia

The intended audience for this website are the casual readers of Astro City Comics. It is a place for them to visit when they want additional information about the characters, places and events that occur between the covers of those publications.

With that in mind, here are some additional Guidelines for authors to consider.

• Provide Context to your Writing

Trivia is great, that is a major aspect of what this site is all about. However, when appending it to Herocopia pages, try to provide context, so the information isn't just noise.

For example this isn't very useful to a casual reader:

Earliest Appearance: 1959, 1964 to general population of Earth

This on the other hand provides meaningful context that allows a Herocopia visitor to clearly understand the information being provided. Basically it has meaning and can be easily understood:

In 1959, Eliot Mills saw and reported this incident for a feature story that he hoped would be printed in the Astro City Rocket newspaper. It was massively edited before publication and the general public did not hear of Shirak until five years later.

• Try to avoid "passive voice" sentence structures.

They are cumbersome and difficult to read with comprehension. Unfortunately, this site is littered with examples. Please try not to add to the confusion-pollution. If you need help identifying "passive voice," this article [1] is concise and clear. Anyway I liked it. You can also "google" for others.

Please use good judgement when editing "passive voice" passages. Not all of them are evil.

• Create and Use Tables!

Please try to minimize creating a multitude of Herocopia pages for depositing tiny tidbits of information. Consider instead using a table or list on a single page. The information will organize better that way, and will be a more pleasing reading experience for visitors to our site. If you need help building tables, this page[2] should prove useful. You can also tug on my cape for questions. I will work to answer then as time permits.

• Other Stuff

The Herocopia Project encompassed within this wiki site is changing and maturing. There is still a LOT of stuff about the tools and structures of mediaWiki to learn and digest. Changes will continue as we learn more.

The general attitudes here are more lax than the main Wikipedia site. Please help to keep them that way. I hate rules and fiefdoms.

Thanks for your patience and understanding here.

- The Information Broker

Quick tips for creating and editing pages

Create a new page

• Go to the two Character templates and copy the "syntax" portion from the template's documentation.
• Then navigate to the page you want to create, i.e. to create a page for "Samaritan" enter

  http://www.herocopia.com/Samaritan

  in your browser.
• Click the "edit" tab, paste the template code, and start creating!

Link to another page

• Surround the word in double brackets...

  [[Samaritan]]

  ...and it will link to that page, whether it exists yet or not.

Linking Page to a Category

• At the bottom of a page, enter

  [[Category: (category name)]]

  and it will link to that category, as well as include the page in that category (whether the category exists yet or not).

• To create a link to a category *without* including the page in that category, add a colon in front, i.e.

  [[:Category: (category name)]]

  .

• Wikipedia Category Help http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Category

• Wikipedia Categorization FAQ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorisation_FAQ

Image Uploading

• Check Special:Imagelist to see if the image you need already exists.
• If not, upload a new image here: http://www.herocopia.com/index.php/Special:Upload
• Try to find clean images that are complete. By that, I mean don't chop word balloons in half, don't make small images larger than their scanned size. In otherwords, use good visual editing skills when choosing images.
• Except for covers from Vertigo.com, Don't pirate images from other sites, even if they source from Astro City comics. Scan them yourself.

• To use the image, place this tag into the page:

  [[Image:filename.jpg]]

  .

• To align the image to the right, use this tag:

  [[Image:filename.jpg|right]]

  .

• To place a thumbnail of a larger image, use:

  [[Image:filename.jpg|right|thumb|250px]]

  .

• Any text entered in the tag that isn't recognized will appear as a caption in the thumbnail image, i.e.

  [[Image:filename.jpg|right|thumb|250px|This is a picture of Samaritan]]

  .

• More image help: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Images_and_other_uploaded_files