User talk:Arby777

Welcome!
Well met, Arby777. Welcome to the Forgotten Realms Wiki! Thank you for your recent edit. We hope to see more great edits!

The FR Wiki aims to be a valuable resource for all Realms fans, players, and DMs. As you edit, please keep in mind these five important rules:
 * 1) Use only official sources—no homebrew!
 * 2) Do not copy text from these sources; use your own words.
 * 3) Write everything in narrative tense (past tense), just like any novel.
 * 4) Add citations for any statements that you make—at least one per paragraph.
 * 5) Avoid using the Visual Editor; use the Source Editor instead.

In case you need some help, here are some quick guides:
 * General help • Editing articles • Referencing and citing • Policies • Canon • Copyrights

…Or leave a message on my talk page or ask any of the other administrators about things.

We hope that you enjoy editing here. Again, welcome! Happy scribing!

— Ir'revrykal (talk) 14:09, May 3, 2020 (UTC)

P.S.: Please sign your messages on Talk and Forum pages using four tildes ( ~ ) to automatically add your name and the date.

Novel Indexing & Summarizing
Hi, Arby,

Welcome to the wiki! I saw a few of your earlier articles, and I thank you for taking care on them as you get started as a new editor. It's a welcome change to have someone join in carefully at first.

I see that you have started working on expanding the article for The City of Splendors: A Waterdeep Novel novel. That's great; we need more articles like this to help connect all the lore on the wiki, and novels have historically been overlooked relative to sourcebooks here.

I wanted to point out a few things before you get too deep into it.


 * First, a summary is a very short summary about the book. If you plan on expanding it in great detail, like a chapte-by-chapter overview of events, that would be called a Synopsis. I do not know which you plan to do, but since the article already has the official "blurb" quoted from the back of the book, a Summary is probably redundant. See Blackstaff or Star of Cursrah or any of the other novel articles that I am working on for examples of Synopsis sections.
 * Second, for Indexes, we use a format that allows for automatic generation of an alphabetical list of topics and page numbers. For example, please use a format like this:

Characters




Creatures




Locations




Miscellaneous




Organizations




Spells




Weapons





 * In each of the  you should insert a link and a page ranges, like this:  . If you do not want to do the work to record page numbers, at least create links:

Characters

 * Waldo • Big Bird


 * Barney
 * There is no need to describe the roles of the characters; let the articles themselves provide all of that information or introduce it in the Synopsis.

Keep up the good work, and happy editing!

~ Lhynard (talk) 20:35, May 5, 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, Lhynard for the welcome and great information. Clearly I have a learning curve to go through to be a good wiki editor. I mostly a novel reader and not so much an RPG player, so I am happy to contribute to an area that may be lacking! My work on The City of Splendors: A Waterdeep Novel is a "read in progress" as I am only on chapter three right now. But with such a big cast of characters already, I thought I would go ahead and get started with some content here.

I don't plan on writing a Synopsis (that would take too much time for me), but I was hoping to provide a Summary at a deeper level than the book blurb. Honestly the blurb for this particular novel explains practically nothing. So I feel like a little further information, staying spoiler free, would be helpful.

I will also confess I think I screwed up the Crawling Spider page. I think I accidentally overwrote the Building Template - my sincere apologies for that. I thought I was following the right protocol in using the template, but I think I overwrote it. I hope this doesn't cause hardship for the admins. I decided to stay away from creating new pages and focus on only modifying existing ones.

Thank you again for your message. I will strive to do better! Arby777 (talk) 21:41, May 5, 2020 (UTC)