Help:Style guide

A small introduction to wikiing!
Welcome, brave adventurer, if you are a seasoned Wiki-Veteran, you may just skip most of the information here but all you Newbies, please read the following lines!

What is important?
Actually, everything! EVERYTHING. Well, almost. But if you'd like to help to fill up this Wiki, find everything of interest as you go about adventuring in The Elder Scrolls: Online and take notes (the same goes for any other games and their wikis!).

Now some of you may perhaps wonder, how do I start? First of all, get yourself a screen capturing program, a good one is Fraps but there are many others, you can either buy it or use its free, but limited version. The free version only gives you the option to create BMP images, but the quality is fine. You can simply use a program like Irfan and do a batch conversion to one of the formats used on the wiki. The allowed formats are: png, gif, jpg, jpeg, ico, svg, jpg, jpeg, gif, png, webp, bmp, ogg, mp3, pdf, sc2map, ogg, ogv, oga, flac, wav, webm.

Also note: try keep the quality high, but the file size as low as possible.

Fraps really is easy to use, open just the main window and look at the screenshots section. There you can define a folder to save the screenshots in, the hotkey and if you bought the program, which format. Else, it works as described before, but you only get BMP, which is fine. To tick the settings on the right, isn't really necessary. When you have done this, leave the program open and start your game!

Then it's up to you - what's important for you? What could be important for other players? What would you like to share? Or what would you like to see on the wiki?

Templates
You can find some of the most commonly used templates, infoboxes, here: Infobox templates

Confusing for some, but necessary! Articles are sweet, but an infobox gives a better overview - plus, it's great for maintenance. You can just add all the information you have into it. If something needs to be changed in them, it's super easy!

At the moment, this wiki has infoboxes for Items, Locations, NPCs and Quests. Contact an admin if you have a problem or an idea - or if you need another box.

Here is an example of a working Quest and Location template: The Frozen Man (Quest).

Images
Images should be uploaded here: Category: Images. As you can see, there are many sub-categories for all the items, locations, NPCs etc. Please try to sort them properly in the right category.

Uploading Images
On the left side of the screen, under Tools, you'll see "Upload file". This works well enough for single images. Simply click on that option and check it out! The description on the page is rather self-explanatory, just be sure your image-name is unique, otherwise a warning will pop-up telling you of the conflict. If your image is categorically better and covers the same subject as the existing image, you may overwrite it. If you are unsure, change the destination file name so that it doesn't conflict. When uploading an image this way, you can add the destination category in the summary field, for NPCs this for instance would be:  .

If you have a whole batch of images, it is easier to go directly to the specific image category page, choose edit from the actions menu and then little the green arrow button in the toolbar on the top left of the edit screen. Hovering over that icon will display "Select files". Once you click on the button, a window will open and you will be able to choose all of the images you want to have uploaded into that section. Do that and then look at the page again. For each image in the list, on the right, there should be checkbox which you can tick to add the image category to the file description, to get everything neatly into the right category (the text should tell you so). Once you have done this, look at the bottom of the list of images and click "Click here to upload this file". Click and the upload should start, depending on the number of files being uploaded, this can take some time.

NPC pages and style
For NPCs we thought up something to unify all of the portraits. It's not rocket science, but you probably will need to have a few image editing skills.

Knowing a bit about how to use Gimp, Photoshop or Corel will be just enough to do this. You can easily download Gimp here! The last stable Version is 2.8 and the description below is based on that version. If you have an older version, the interface and the controls might look a bit different and saving might differ from version 2.8. Just grab the frame image and follow the instructions below. Tip: Ctrl+Z is undo ... whenever you feel you need to undo the last thing you did, just use that.

After you have installed the program, open the desired image:

Then simply choose the image of the frame and open it as well.

Select all (Ctrl+A) of the frame image, Ctrl+C to copy it into your paste buffer and then move back to the original image and use Ctrl+V to paste the copied frame onto the previously opened image. Then position it a little, so it gives a nice portrait.

The frame is still selected in the picture above, in Version 2.8 of Gimp you should see a small anchor icon when you hover over the selected frame. Use the LMB to anchor the frame.

Now choose the crop composition tool and drag a net over the place you want to crop. Again LMB when you are sure it's fine. You still can Ctrl+Z, if things don't quite turn out as planned.

Once you're sure everything is fine, go to Data and Export. This works a bit differently compared to the older versions of Gimp. Save only saves the file in the native Gimp format .xcf, so you must choose Export to save the file to one of the accepted wiki formats.

Choose the format from the list below. If there is some transparency in the image, use .png, if not, then .jpg is fine, and export!

More Help needed?!?
Need more help? Click here: Help:Contents