Wowpedia:Community Portal/Collaborations/COTW

Collaborations of The Week are community projects created by the Community teams. Week is used as an unspecified amount of time. The collaborations change when one has gotten enough attention and there is a new idea for a collaboration. Current Average Collaboration Time: 6 Months.

Previous Collaborations of the Week are archived to previous collaborations.

Current Collaboration

This collaboration will be focused on item creation and improvement. While Thottbot and Allakhazam have excellent databases of items (and will prove useful in creating articles). Internal links are always preferred over external links. Since many articles link to items having internal links will keep a user from having to go off-site to get to additional information. A lot of people have a preference for one site or the other, rather than forcing the reader to go to the site of the author's choice they can go to an internal page where they should be able to get the information they need. Most items pages (should) have links to external pages, which allow the reader to go to the site of their choice if they want more information.

Items should be imported to WoWWiki in a priority consistent with the likelihood of the item being linked to and the demand in likely readership for a particular item. This means that popular items than many people use or try to get, quest items, and end game epics and rares should get priority. Vendor Trash on the other hand is unlikely to ever be linked to by anything and probably doesn't need to have entire articles dedicated to it. The priority is just a suggestion, however, and importing any items will help. Some suggestions to creating item articles or extending articles on existing items.

Choosing Items articles to improve or create

With so many items in the game it can be hard to decide what item(s) to create. Here are some suggestions.

• Choose an item your character is already wearing. Most articles don't have a picture of the item in use and a picture of the item helps complete an item article, if you take a screen shot of your character wearing certain items you can create an article and use the screen shot to as a picture of the item in use. If the article already exists then you can add the picture to the article.
• Choose a favorite item. Most of the popular items are already in WoWWiki, but search for your favorite items and see if they exist. If it doesn't exist create it. If it does exist see if you can improve on it.
• Category:Stubs/Item - A list of articles on items which have been created, but have no (or little) content.
• Category:Articles with external links - A list of articles that have a lot of external links, if there is an item that is being link to externally, try importing that information into WoWWiki.
• Category:Items - Item articles, just start browsing and see which ones you can improve on.
• Special:Wantedpages - List of pages that need to be created, look for items on this list.

Tips on creating Item Articles

• Search for the item you want to add first and make sure it doesn't already exist
• Use the item boilerplate as a starting point for creating articles.
• Use Allakhazam or Thottbot to get all the information needed for the article (Allakhazam doesn't have durability information).
• To find the inventory icon for that particular item, right click on the picture on Allakhazam and see what the picture name is. To see if the inventory icon has already been uploaded to WoWWiki, view this search on the Imagelist.
• Once you have created an item article search for that item again. Change any references to that item into internal links.

Tips on improving articles

• Boilerplate:Item is a great template for item pages. Many item articles were created before the boilerplate was in use or the author simply didn't use it. For conistency you may want to ensure that all the item articles you look at follow the same style.

List of useful links

• Allakhazam - external resource
• Thottbot - external resource
• Category:Stubs/Item - List if item pages that need information
• Category:Articles with external links - List of pages with many external links
• Special:Wantedpages - List of pages that need to be created
• Boilerplate:Item - A template for creating a new Item article
• Help:Starting a new page - Help on creating a new page
• WoWWiki:Searching - Searching WoWWiki
• Help:Link, Help:Editing (Links) - information about linking
• Help:Images and other uploaded files - Information about using and uploading images
• Misc Policy on preference for internal links
• List of uploaded inventory icons