Civilization Wiki:Community Portal

See Community for the online Civilization community in general

Welcome!

This portal is intended to be an entrance foyer with labelled doors to various parts of our 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.

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

Social conduct[]

Everyone is expected to behave themselves and to assume good faith. That is, be civil and assume that people are trying to help rather than hurt (unless, of course, faced with obvious vandalism, but even then you should still be polite towards the vandal). If it looks like an edit war might be starting, start a discussion on the article's talk page instead. No personal attacks, name calling, or anything like that. Established editors are expected not to bite the newcomers.

Editing[]

First of all, please navigate to Special:Preferences and select Source editor from the Preferred editor drop down menu. 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. The visual editor is also known to make unwanted edits and break the layout of our articles.

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.

Note that all new infoboxes should be of the portable variety, i.e. made with the <infobox> element and not regular tables. This ensures they can be correctly viewed on all kinds of devices, not just desktop computers with big monitors.

Article contents[]

Main page: Forum:Wiki_purpose_policy_proposal

Articles should be about the Civilization game series, its community, and the games' contents.
Articles need not contain information about the real life version of game content other than that already provided by the game.
- Link to Wikipedia instead when you want to provide that kind of information.
- The "Civilopedia" entries on this wiki are copied directly from the relevant games. They are included here for completeness; please do not edit them.
- Strategy and information derived from playing the game is of course always welcome!

Page naming conventions[]

You should follow the naming conventions set in the game in question. Where that's not an option, use sentence case, i.e. don't begin words with capital letters if they could also appear in text without them. So, since the games usually write the units as "Siege Worm" you should use that instead of "Siege worm" as the page name. It is advisable to create a redirect from the latter to the former, though. However, if you were to create a strategy guide on killing Siege Worms, you should name it to something like "Strategy guide on killing Siege Worms" instead of "Strategy Guide On Killing Siege Worms".

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 (Civ5).

Image naming conventions[]

Images meant to be shown in an infobox should be named accordingly to the primary article they are meant for. This way the templates can find the images automatically. For example, if you have an article called Heavy Chariot (Civ6), you should also have an image called File:Heavy Chariot (Civ6).png. Template:Unit (Civ6) 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".

In other circumstances: TBA

Categories[]

Every article should be in some category. However, since this wiki relies heavily on templates, the categories should be added using them, not manually article by article. Additionally, you should use reasonably specific categories. Tagging all Civ5 units, buildings, techs etc. with Category:Civilization V brings no value, as then that category will be filled with clutter and cannot be used for navigation (or for anything else that matter). Instead, use Category:Units (Civ5), Category:Buildings (Civ5) and Category:Technologies (Civ5), and add those categories into the main Category:Civilization V.

Example: say you've got a unit called XCOM Squad from Civilization V. That should be in Category:Units (Civ5). Now, instead of editing the XCOM Squad page and adding that category, you would edit the Template:Unit (Civ5) and have that one add the category to all pages where it is used.

If you think a template should implement a new category, but you have never edited a template or are not 100% confident with your editing skills, please open a discussion at the template's talk page or the forum. Finally, if you do end up creating a new category by yourself, 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.

Links[]

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. If you are an experienced editor, there are link templates that can help you do this automatically. 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.

Discussion[]

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's Wall 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.

Search[]

To find pages that particularly interest you, one option is to try the "Search" box at top. 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.

Technical[]

Interesting pages[]

Want to find out what you've done so far? Visit Special:Mycontributions
Find out more about the wiki on Special:Statistics and Special:Version!