Welcome!

This portal is intended to be an entrance foyer with labelled doors to various parts of our fledgling empire, which we hope will stand the test of time! (However, the menus at the top of every page contain links to most of the games.)

If you are a keen follower of the original "Civilization" or any spin-off or sequel or Colonization and its sequels and imitations, but have never written anything on a wiki, please go to Help:Contents, or go straight to Help:Editing, where you will see how easy it is to become a Web Publisher. (Basically, if you can type and click, you can edit this site - and as you are reading this you can almost certainly type and click; so there you are!!!)

A good way to help in the site's development is to read the suggestions at Talk:Current events then tackle some of the most Wanted pages, concentrating on those that relate to the game(s) you are familiar with.

EditingEdit

First of all, please navigate to Special:Preferences and uncheck the Enable visual editor (where available) checkbox. That allows you to see the source code of the page you are editing. This is important because many of the pages use templates, and they cannot be easily edited when you don't see their code.

Templates are a way of standardizing the layout and looks of pages. See, for example, the Electricity (Civ5) page. The "infobox" at right is a template (called Template:Tech (Civ5)): the editor just fills in the values for the variables, and the wiki draws it as a nice table-like box. Pretty much everything has been templated for Civilization V: units, resources, buildings, etc. Similar templates also exist for Civilization IV and several other games, and experienced users can help create more if you ask.

You can create new templates by yourself or request one to be created at the help desk. :)

Page naming conventionsEdit

Along with most of Wikia and Wikipedia, we use sentence case for page names. If a word can appear in text without a capital letter, don't give it one in the page name (except that you don't have a choice with the very first letter of the name).

You should soon notice that we have many "overview pages" that briefly cover buildings, units, wonders, etc that appear in more than one game, and by contrast we have pages that deal with those in relation to just one game at a time, e.g. Settler (Civ4). When creating new pages, please follow that arrangement, so that other users can easily predict what page name to look for if checking whether there is a page they want. Some of the earliest-created pages do not follow the current model. Use "Move" or "Rename" (found in the drop-down menu under "Edit") to change a page name when necessary.

Also please do create redirects from alternative spellings and capitalizations to the actual content page. For example, Composite bowman (Civ5) is a redirect to Composite Bowman (G&K) since G&K is an expansion of Civ5.

Image naming conventionsEdit

Images should be named accordingly to the primary article they are meant for. This way the templates can find the images automatically. Preferably even name the images with all lowercase letters. For example, if you have an article called Composite Bowman (G&K), you should also have an image called image:composite bowman (g&k).png. Template:Unit (Civ5) will then find that image automatically based on the page name and attach it to the infobox automatically!

Do not upload images with names such as "Warrior.png" because they cannot be disambiguated automatically. Instead, if the image is from, say, Civilization Revolution, upload it as "Warrior (CivRev).png", or if it is from Civilization III upload it as "Warrior (Civ3).png".

LinksEdit

Links should point to the most relevant article with the most accurate suffix. This means that in an article that is about Civilization V, you should link to Settler (Civ5) instead of linking to Settler. Do add links to items that should have an article even if they don't have it yet! It makes the link red, but red links are just an invitation for editors to write more articles. :) Even better, write the article by yourself after creating a link to it!

DiscussionEdit

We have the facility for discussion forums for any matter not confined to a particular page. You can use the talk page of another contributor for a quick specific question or comment, but if the answer might help other users a forum is better because it's easier to find and categorize.

The Talk page linked to each article or category is a good place to discuss anything specific to that article or category, and each User Talk page is for sending messages to that user (though anyone can read them).

A relatively new feature of Wikia sites is the user blog. That is a piece written by a user, which other users can comment on but not edit. Your blog could be a good place to post your own game reports! Then others can ask about why you chose particular tactics or strategies and you can explain in a reply to the comment. You can categorize blog posts as with most other pages, to help people find posts related to specific subjects.

SearchEdit

To find pages that particularly interest you, one option is to try the "Search" box at top right. Another option is to look at the complete alphabetical list of categories or the manually-created grouped list of main categories. Work your way up and down through subcategories, starting at the top or in any category you come across.

CategoriesEdit

Every article should be in a category (or more than one); if you find one that isn't, you can fix that: just decide what category it belongs in and type [[Category:Category name]] at the bottom of the page. If creating a new category, please use "sentence case" (which means using capital letters only for proper nouns), then edit the new category page so that it has at least one parent category.