Help:Documenting Contacts

Overview

Creating a new contact in the Wiki can be a simple or an easy task, depending on how in-depth your article is. Personally, I shoot for making it as complete as possible. It takes a lot longer to work through a contact's missions, but it's very satisfying to see every possible thing that one could want to know about a contact all in one place.

Structure of the Page

Each contact information page has three parts: a header, a content section, and a footer.

The Header

The header should contain two things: a code to keep the page as a whole intact (so that each individual section and subsection are not individually editable) and a contact photograph.

The __NOEDITSECTION__ Code

The code to keep the page intact as a whole is __NOEDITSECTION__ and should be entered at the top of every contact article.

Contact Photographs

As for the contact photograph, it should refer to a good image of the contact uploaded to the wiki. The code to add it is [[Image:''(image name)''.jpg|right|thumb|100px]]. This code will format the photograph in an easy-to-see manner.

Some miscellaneous notes about contact photographs:

• Screenshots from the game tend to be a bit on the dark side. For optimum display, all screenshots should be gamma-adjusted so that the colors and the subject show up as well as possible.
• The source photograph for every contact should be formatted as an image 700 to 750 pixels tall and 300 to 450 pixels wide, with the standard being 700x300 pixels. Images should be scaled and cropped to fit this specification as closely and as reasonably as possible.
• The contact photograph filename should be in .jpg file format. The filename should be the same as the contact name, with periods omitted and underscores (_) replacing any spaces.

A typical header is as follows:

__NOEDITSECTION__
[[Image:Mr_Bocor.jpg|right|thumb|100px]]

The Footer

Every contact article should end with the categories in which the contact article should appear. The following categories should be used:

• CoH and/or CoV, depending on which game the contact appears in.
• Contacts
• CoH Contacts and/or CoV Contacts, depending on which game the contact appears in.

To include a contact in a category, enter it as [[Category:''(category name)'']]. Categories should all appear on one line, one after the other, preferably with the more general categories preceeding the more specific ones. A typically category footer will appear as follows:

[[Category:CoV]][[Category:Contacts]][[Category:CoV Contacts]]

The Content Section

The main information about a contact is split into separate sections to make it easy for one to find what one is looking for quickly and easily in the automatically generated Table of Contents on every contact page. These sections are as follows:

• Overview: A very brief description of the contact, including city zone and coordinates.
• The Table of Contents: Including a Table of Contents makes the information about a contact easy for a user to navigate.
• Introductions: This includes information on who introduces the contact to a hero or villains, as well as who the contact may introduce to hero or villain to.
• Store: If a contact sells items to a hero or villain, the items sold and cost are included here.
• Missions: This is detailed information about the missions that a contact assigns to a hero or a villain.

A detailed description of documenting each section is contained below.

The Overview

The overview is a very brief description of the contact, including city zone and coordinates. Please be sure to link the city zone name. A typical overview might be as follows:

'''Mr. Bocor''' is a City of Villains contact located in [[Port Oakes]].  He
is located at coordinates (-406, 64, -43).

This overview will appear like this when the page is actually rendered:

Mr. Bocor is a City of Villains contact located in Port Oakes. He is located at coordinates (-406, 64, -43).

The Table of Contents

If this is left out, a Table of Contents may be automatically generated for the page, but it depends on whether the content is long enough to trigger the automatic ToC mechanism, and it is placed before the overview by default.

By manually inserting the __TOC__ code, the Table of Contents is always inserted precisely where it should be: immeditealy after the overview section. The __TOC__ code should be on a line by itself, and there should be no blank lines before or after the __TOC__ code between the overview section and the Introductions section.

The Introductions Section

The Introductions section consists of two sub-sections: the Contact Introduced By section and the New Contact(s) section.

The Contact Introduced By section is the list of contacts that introduced the subject to the hero or villain. The list should use the standard WikiMedia list mechanism and all names should be linked to the introducing contact's respective wiki articles. A typical Contact Introduced By section appears as:

=== Contact Introduced By ===

* [[Drea the Hook]]
* [[Mikey the Ear]]

The New Contact(s) section is about the same, except whenever possible, a description of the new contact as presented by the introducing contact should be provided. A typical New Contact(s) section is as follows:

=== New Contact(s) ===

* [[Drea the Hook]]
* [[Mikey the Ear]]