Forgotten Realms Wiki:Help-Editing articles

By editing articles on the Forgotten Realms Wiki, you will be helping to improve and update the single biggest source of Forgotten Realms information on the Internet, and hopefully you will enjoy it too. There are two reasons for editing an article: to add new information to the wiki, or to update or correct out-of-date or inaccurate information.

Adding new information
There are thousands of pages on this wiki, containing a lot of information on many different subjects, but due to the ever-changing nature of the Realms and its writings spanning the past twenty years, there will always be the need for more detail or information on new subjects.

When adding information, it is important to consider your source or sources. You should be certain that, if someone were to challenge the truthfulness or accuracy of a statement you are adding, that you will be able to lead them to a canon source on the matter. See Help:Citing sources for more information on this.

Do not copy text directly from any source materials! These materials are copyrighted and directly copying large chunks from Realms products is infringing these copyrights. Your edits will be reverted or simply deleted if you do this. Please see Help:Plagiarism for more information on this.

Don't be concerned if you aren't entirely sure that you're putting information in the right place, or laying it out in the correct way. The emphasis is on contributing to the extent that you are comfortable with, and if you are new, someone else will come along and edit your contributions in the case that they are in the wrong place or style. Please do not be offended if your work is edited, even if you feel that subsequent edits have made it worse. The wiki is a collaboration and no particular person "owns" any particular text. All the editors are trying to achieve the same goal.

Editing existing information
Due to the collaborative factor involved in creating a wiki of this scale, and due to the fact that editors of all levels of experience are contributing on a regular basis, articles gradually grow and become modified, and with this, errors can creep in.

Factual inaccuracies
Occasionally things that represent themselves as facts are simply incorrect. Even major encyclopedias contain factual errors. If you come across a piece of information that you know to be wrong, you must be able to find a source that says otherwise! Changing a piece of information because you believe it to be wrong, but not being able to find a source that upholds your beliefs is leaving yourself prone to introducing new inaccuracies. If you can correct the information and provide a canon source, hit the edit button and change it. If you need help on citing sources, see Help:Citing sources.

Typos, spelling, punctuation and grammar
If you find any problems with typos, spelling, punctuation or grammar, please feel free to dive straight in and correct them. Usually these are very small edits, so you can mark them as a minor edit. Please note that this wiki follows Wikipedia in that it does not show any preference for British English or American English (or any other variation), unless the spelling is taken directly from the source material. Please keep to correcting genuine errors and not changing spellings between British and American English.

Messiness
Usually messiness arises because articles aren't created in their entirety in one session. Instead, they are gradually amended by various editors, and sometimes this can lead to an article having information in a nonsensical or confusing order, or being made up of very short or very long paragraphs, or having very awkward English. Please feel free to edit these articles to make them better. Usually, no further information is required; it should simply be a matter of rearranging or rephrasing what is already there. For a list of articles that are in need of this treatment, see Category:Articles requiring cleanup.

What needs editing
At any one time, there are many articles that need attention. Some of these have been marked by fellow editors, and you can find these by starting in Category:Articles needing attention. Others can be found simply by browsing through the wiki. If you notice that a page needs attention, but you do not want to do it yourself, you can add a template like Cleanup to the top of the page to notify others that action is required.