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. New Users: Aid to Getting Started This site has been around for quite some time now. Over the years a lot of culture and conventions have become the norm for editing and creating new content. It might be a bit of stiff learning ccurve to get the hang of things around here, but once you dig in, we think things will come together for you, and take note that each page comes with a "Discussion" tab. That is a great place to ask questions about that page in particular, and you can use the Community portal discussion tab for questions about the site in general. For starters, this site uses templates to control editing and look n' feel. You are free to build new pages in a free form fashion if you like, but that is probably going to entail a lot more work on your end, and will definitely see a lot of rewrite by other contributors to bring it inline with the mechanics that allow new pages to leverage the functions and infrastructure that we have build into the site. There are five major areas (and a lot of little ones too) where Herocopia is always in need of help. Each area has specific templates to aid in the editing process. #1) Authoring Character Pages We use templates for Characters and other things relating to Astro City. Assistance on how to use them can be found by clicking here. #2) Building Event Note Cards for Events and Annotations We are currently in a big push to build Event Annotation Note Cards. These too are template driven, and they are engineered to generate automatic timelines and appearance lists for just about everything related to Astro City. More information on how you can help with this part of the Herocopia Project can be found by clicking here. #3) Authoring Non-Character Pages These are pages that relate to City infrastructure, places, neighborhoods, organizations and things beyond Astro City proper. They are built using Device templates. #4) Authoring Publication Details This section of the Herocopia Project focuses on providing information about all the various comics books, trade collections, and other miscellaneous material published about the World of Astro City. Yep, you guessed. They too are best edited using templates. #5) General Editing and Fact Checking In addition, a lot of the longer running characters need updates, or attention, and some could use a touch of editing here and there to make them more readable. Also, we are in constant Fact-Checking mode. This is best done by referencing the source material directly and validating that the information here on the Herocopia site is as accurate as possible. Alas, that means reading Astro City Comics. Rough work for sure, but hey(!), someone has to do it. 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. [clarification needed] Usually and in most cases, when "[clarification needed]" is sprinkled into the commentary, it is because some form of specific information is needed to provide context to the commentary. Follow the suggestion mention above and/or a combination of the following is also suggested as a possibility. An issue, page and panel reference if it is in story. If it is out of story, a reference or link to the outside source is helpful. The letters page perhaps, or a thread forum on the web (provide a link if at all possible). If you are referencing a comment that one of the creators have stated, an exact quote is best, with a link if it is online. Bruisers, the Astro City message board run by John Rosell, is gone. Many of us long timers still have memories of the insightful commentary made there, but with it gone there is no link. So, if you are referring to something from there, some kind of specific reference to it is helpful, provides context and backs up the comment. Example: During the heyday of the creator developed message board, Bruiser's, the identity and background of The Blue Knight caused quite a flurry of activity. Many commentators immediately noticed the visual hint of the Blue Knight's image reflected in car mirrors and darkened windows, strategically placed in a few of the panels featuring police officer Joshua Stone. One poster even tried to elicit commentary by suggesting that not only was Joshua the Blue Knight, but he was also patrolling the streets of Astro City as The Street Angel. Keep in mind, the goal is to provide a reference point, a basis for stating the speculation. Use footnotes if the reference is cumbersome and breaks the word flow of the main commentary. 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. Contributing Tidbits of information, a tiny tidbit at a time. 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. UPDATE: now that we are integrating more and more SemanticWiki queries into the pages of Herocopia, the best choice for containing tibits of data will be on the pages of Annotation Event Note Cards. We can use queries to extract out the information and let wiki derived a lot of our tables automatically. Maintenance will be far easier, and the note cards provided direct context to the source of the data tidbits being referenced. Other Stuff The Herocopia Project encompassed within this wiki site is changing and maturing. A LOT of stuff about the tools and structures of mediaWikis continues to be learned and digested. Changes will continue as we expand out knowledge set. The general attitudes here are more lax than the main Wikipedia site. Please work to keep them that way. I hate rules and fiefdoms. Thanks for your patience and understanding here. - The Information Broker Quick tips for editing pages 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 Creating Pages Use the special starter templates provided for the standard Herocopia pages (Characters, Devices, and Events). There are links above for more information on how to use the. 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 other words, use good visual editing skills when choosing images. Except for covers provided directly from the publisher's website, don't pirate images from other sites. 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 Pages that Need Help While you are always welcome to edit and add to any page(s) that catch your attention, the following pages have been marked as "stubs" and could use some help. Stubs List A Little Knowledge, Adventures in Other Worlds, Alien Detector, Alien Spacecraft, Alvarado Funds, An Avian Alliance, Andrea or Allison, Antarean Kaleidojewel, Ar-mang, Arthur, Ashton Colt, Astro City Comets, Astro City Fire Department, Astro City No.10, Astro City No.2, Astro City No.29, Astro City No.3, Astro City No.30, Astro City No.31, Astro City No.32, Astro City No.33, Astro City No.34, Astro City No.35, Astro City No.36, Astro City No.4, Astro City No.5, Astro City No.6, Astro City No.7, Astro City No.8, Astro City No.9, AstroBank, AstroBus Tours, Back Door Teleportation Spell, Mrs. Bannerjee, Battletoon, Beekeeper, Bob Cottonman, Bolbra, Bolbra's Parents, Breslow, Mr. Bridwell, Caleb Tarrant, Candlemen, Carlos Andriani, K.O. Carson, Central-Western Railroad, The Choirboys, Cleopatra (Original), Collapsar Wave, Contact Matrix... further results