Help:Writing Articles

Welcome to The Big Cartoon Wiki! This page will provide a tutorial on how to write high-quality pages for our wiki. Our community is pretty lenient on what pages are allowed, but if you write pages that are missing information we may mark it as a stub or even delete it. If you follow these instructions, it will ensure that your article is up to our highest standards.

Introduction

Before you begin, make sure that your page is allowed on our wiki. Visit Project:Policy to see what kinds of pages we accept. If a page violates these rules, it may be immediately deleted and an admin will leave a comment on your page explaining why.

Next, make sure that the page you are writing doesn't already exist. If you are creating a page for a specific piece of media like "Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island", check if a page for that series already exists. In this example, Scooby-Doo (film series) already exists so you would create a new section on that page instead of a new one.

Title

When you pick a title for your page, make sure that it follows Wikipedia's conventions for page names. If multiple things exist under the same name then add the type of media in parenthesis. So instead of creating Super Mario World, you would break that page up into Super Mario World (cartoon) and Super Mario World (game). If the page contains any non-English characters, you can copy the title directly from Wikipedia to make sure you get them right.

Logo

Every page begins with a logo and brief summary of what the media is about. The very first thing in your page should be a transparent logo inserted like [[File:IMAGENAME.png|thumb]]. Before you upload a logo, see if it exists on Wikimedia Commons. Our wiki has InstantCommons enabled so you can use any image on that wiki without re-uploading it here.

If you want to add more information below the logo (this is preferable) you can add an infobox to the page. A list of these and instructions on how to use them can be found at Category:Infobox_templates. Find the infobox you want, paste the code to the top of your article and fill out the fields.

Summary

Once you add a logo, you need to write a short description on what the media is. At minimum, you should include one or two sentences on what the movie, game or comic is about. At most, you should have one or two paragraphs explaining the piece of media. The first paragraph should give general information about the media. Explain who created the media, who published it, how many episodes/games it has and how long the original run was.

In the second paragraph, go into more detail about the plot. What is the media about? Who is the main character? What do they do? How does the story begin? Who is the villain? How are the stories generally structured? You don't need to give a synopsis of the entire media, just a few sentences is fine. If you want an example on how to write these two paragraphs, read the media's Wikipedia article and see how they structure things. Please note that it is against our site's rules to directly copy content from Wikipedia so please make sure everything you write is in your own words.

Sections

Here is the most important part of your article. Every section should have a name of the episode/movie/comic and the number in parenthesis. If your article is a cartoon or anime, then Episode Name (S01E01) is a good format. If it is a comic or manga, write Episode name (Chapter 001 Page 001). If the page is a videogame or movie series, then the section title should just be the name of the particular film or game.

Under each section, you should describe the scene in one or two sentences. Below that, you include a gallery of all of the images you have uploaded. Galleries are written in the format:

<gallery>
imagename.png
anotherimage.jpeg
thirdimage.png
</gallery>

Each row should contain the full name of the image without the File: before it. When you include images, make sure you upload just enough images that people can get an idea of the scene. If you are uploading more than a dozen images in a gallery, see if you can remove any. Try to not include too many images from the same shot. Lastly, please pick a good filename for your images so they are easier to find. Good filenames should let us know what the character is and what show they are from.

Terrible filenames

• vlcsnap-2000-01-01-01h01m01s01.png
• Screenshot 2000-01-01-01-01-01-1.png
• Image-001.jpg

Okay filenames

• Character Name 1.png
• charactername-1.jpg
• showname1.png

Great filenames

• Show Character E21 1.png
• Show-EpisodeName-1.jpg
• character-showname-1.jpg

Videos

If possible, you should always upload screenshots and GIFs to pages instead of videos. If you link a video, there is a possibility that it may be taken down due to a copyright claim and the page will be broken. But if you have already added a gallery of images and you want to supplement it with a video, you can embed any video from Youtube with <youtube>jNQXAC9IVRw</youtube> where jNQXAC9IVRw is the video ID in a URL like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw.

See also

This section is optional. If there are any related pieces of media, you can link them here inside a bulleted list. The more of these we have, the better.

Categories

The last piece of information your page needs are the categories. You include these by inserting the text [[Category:Categoryname]] at the bottom of the page. The first categories you include should be the type and producer of the media. Examples include:

[[Category:Nintendo]]
[[Category:TV series]]
[[Category:Hanna-Barbera]]
[[Category:Comics]]

Next, include what tropes your page has. Examples are:

[[Category:Diet episodes]]
[[Category:Male expansion]]
[[Category:Gags]]
[[Category:Air inflation]]

Finally, include the expandee types like:

[[Category:Humans]]
[[Category:Sharks]]
[[Category:Plants]]

If you aren't sure what categories apply to your page, you can visit lots of similar pages and see what other people added to them. The more categories you add to your page, the easier it is to find while browsing.

Conclusion

If you follow these instructions, you should have a highly-professional and easy-to-find page! The more pages we create like this, the easier the wiki becomes to browse. If you see any pages that miss these features, feel free to mark the article with {{stub}} or [[Category:Pages in need of screencaps]] or [[Category:Screencaps in need of better quality]]. If you have any questions on editing a page, post in the Help and Support forum or leave a comment at the bottom of the page. Happy editing!