Destinypedia:New User Guide

Welcome to Destinypedia! Thanks for joining. As long as you follow the guidelines in place for editing pages, you'll do great and help make our wiki as comprehensive as possible.

I am your personal guide to the wiki. If you're new to editing a wiki, there are some useful pages you'd likely not notice on your own for a while. I intend to clue you in on those pages so you can get their information as soon as possible. I don't intend to get too in depth; this is just telling what these things do and where to find them. You can probably figure the rest out yourself, or just ask someone for help if you're having trouble. I want this to be a fairly quick read so that you can know enough to figure out how to use these handy features.

Help
By now, you've probably seen the Help link on that bar to the left. In case you haven't, there you go. I'd definitely recommend checking that out every once in a while. For example, the Editing page will teach you a lot about wiki code, Links will show you how to link to other pages and other sites, and Images will show you how to put images on pages. Whenever you're stumped about how to do something on here, go check the Help section and it should tell you what you need to know. It doesn't cover everything, admittedly, but when that happens you can always count on your fellow Guardians for advice.

Editing toolbar
OK, that last one was pretty obvious, so here's one that will probably take you a bit to notice. At the top of every page here, there's a sort of toolbar. It might vary if you're on a type of page other than a regular wikipage, but on every wikipage it will be the same. There will be several tabs saying "Article," "Discussion," "Edit," "History," and "More Actions". Each article has a unique version for all of these, though their function is the same for all articles.

Article
Clicking Article will take you to the main article, which is probably where you'll be when you try this out. Obvious enough.

Discussion
Discussion is a page for discussing information about the subject of the article. Note: it's not a forum. You're not supposed to talk about whether you like this thing or not, it's for facts. If you disagree with something major about the page, bring it up there, discuss it, and see what other people think. Edit opens up the editor for the article. Pretty self explanatory.

History
History is a something I don't suspect you'll use if you're one of those guys who pops up here, makes three edits, and then is never seen again. However, if you stick around for a while, this is a handy tool. It allows you to view older edits, compare them, view changes, and revert the article to an older edit. History is a bit more complicated than some of the other things on this list, but you should still be able to figure it out.

Edit
Edit allows you to edit the article. Simple enough. I suppose I should mention that this allows you to edit the entire article, as opposed to just individual sections, one at a time.

More actions
More actions contains Move, View links, and Watch. View links shows what pages link to the page you're on, Watch will add the article to you watchlist, which means you'll be notified if there is an edit to the article. Move allows you to functionally rename an article. Do not, do so lightly, it's a bit of a big deal.

Forums
Remember that sidebar the Help section is on? Move up a section and you'll see community. Hover over that, and in the section that opens up you'll see several things, among which is forums. There are three forum sections: General Discussion, Community Proposal, and Support Requests. They're all pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. General Discussion is for talking about anything Destiny related, from lore to gameplay to hype. Support Requests are for asking for help. Community Proposal is for suggesting something fairly big for the community and/or the wiki.

Profile
So, assuming you've made an account and you're not just a guest, if you look in the very top right you should be able to a thing that says "Welcome (Username)" and a button that says "Profile" and a button that says "Log out?". If you click on Profile, you'll be taken... to your profile. There are three parts to your profile: Your user page, your UserWiki page, and your User talk page. You also have a signature, but that's just barely unimportant enough for me to exclude it from this. There's a help page for it, or you can just message someone.

User page
Your user page contains your board, your edit counts, your friends... and a few more things as well. However, you might not have set it up yet. If you want to, just click on "Edit profile" and fill in whatever you feel like filling out. Also, your board is your inbox. If anyone messages you, it'll show up on your board. Just be careful not to go onto someone else's page and mistake their board for yours.

UserWiki
Your UserWiki page is sort of like a private wiki page. Actually, that's pretty much what it is. It works just like a regular wiki page, but it can only be edited by you. Generally, it's used by people a bit more familiar with wiki code who want a more-personalized profile.

User talk
You user talk is an alternative to your board. It can be edited by anyone, and its used to leave messages for you. It's not used especially often, but it has the advantage of being able to hold a conversation between more than two people without having to message each person individually.

Changing user page type
In the top-right of your user page, you'll find a yellow-orange box which gives you the ability to switch your user page between your user profile (default) and your UserWiki page. This simply toggles the page that shows up on your User:{Username} page; the other profile type will always be available as a link from your profile navigation bar.

Special Pages
In the bottom-left of the sidebar you'll find a link to Special pages. There are four parts of Special pages I'll be covering: the Maintenance reports section, recent changes, upload file, and preferences. If you're curious about making a signature, you can find it in here as well under the section Users and Rights, in the preferences page.

Maintenance reports
Not every part of this section is going to be important to you, but in general the pages in this section list problems with the wiki. Wanted pages, stubs, not enough citations, etc. If you can't find something to edit, then give this section a quick check.

Recent changes
Scroll down and find the Recent changes and Logs section, and inside it you can find Recent changes. It's sort of like a history page for the entire wiki. Anyone edits a page or adds a picture or sends a message or does whatever, and it ends up here. It shows most recent first, and it's a good way to stay on top of anything going on in the wiki. A common use for it is checking some of the pages that have been edited, and making sure no one took away anything useful or adding anything incorrect.

Upload file
One section down, you can find Media files and Uploads. In this section, you can find the upload files page. Use this to upload images. A link to this can also be found on the images help page. You can upload from your computer or directly from another website.

Aaaaand, I guess that's it.
I hope this page helped! Like I said, it's not a comprehensive guide, but is just meant to let you know these useful things are here. If you need help with anything just message a wiki administrator or another active user who looks like they know what they're doing. Good luck!