Marspedia:Messy Article Tutorial

How to Create a Bloody Mess on Marspedia

"Anyway, [new article] is a bloody mess right now, some of the grammar is poor too" -- Mike Delaney

How to start a bloody mess

If you want to start with a red link, it's as easy as clicking on the red rink and start typing in the edit window. When you're done, type in a brief summary of what you've done, preferably 10 words or much less.

You might even click on preview to see if you want to make your mess more organized. How to do this is beyond the scope of this article, however.

If there is no red link handy for what you want to write an article about, that's okay. For an article on FUBAR type in:

http://marspedia.org/index.php?title=FUBAR

Note that this assumes you want the article you're starting to be part of the public domain. If you instead want to require attribution to Marspedia, then type in:

http://marspedia.org/index.php?title=CC_Mars:FUBAR

As it's rather unlikely you want to write an article on Marspedia about FUBAR, replace the 'FUBAR' part with the more appropriate topic you want to write an article on.

What to put in your bloody mess

Stick to information that's accurate. If you're not sure about something that you know needs to be included, you can leave in a blank for the value or put in pending or something. Feel free to hit various sites for various facts you can stuff into your mess. Important: DO NOT copy and paste non-public domain text into your article!

For bonus points, add the {{Stub}} and {{Wikify}} template tags.

What to make a bloody mess about

Look for a red link if you don't know what to write about.

Some good places to find them:

Special:Wantedpages
List of Lists

What good is a bloody mess

Wikis are collaborative and iterative. Your bloody mess may be the kernel of a feature grade article after a few dozen changes!

The hard part is starting.

MediaWiki formatting has a reasonably gentle learning curve. As you get practice the initial quality of your contributions will improve. In the meantime, don't be afraid of creating a bloody mess. 8)

Formatting

See Marspedia:MediaWiki formatting.

These are well worth printing:
Wiki Reference Card in PDF format. Very useful, but not especially pretty. One page.

Wikipedia Cheatsheet in PDF format. Much prettier, but nowhere near as comprehensive. One page.