The wiki

New page asks for a title and gives the page an address derived from it. Everything else is optional. If a blank box is the problem, pick one of the six templates — character, location, faction, item, session log, event — each of which is ordinary text with real links already in it, so filling one in leaves you a short list of the next pages worth writing.

The body is markdown: ## for headings, * for lists, **bold**, tables, quotes. Headings at level two and three build a contents list down the side of the page automatically and each gets a link of its own, so you can send somebody a section rather than a page. Images can be uploaded straight into a page, and a page can carry a banner across the top of it.

Two square brackets make a link to another page in the same wiki. This is the single most useful thing on the page and the thing most people do not find on their own.

[[Coldharbour]]

Links to the page called Coldharbour, showing the word Coldharbour.

[[Coldharbour|the port]]

The same link, reading “the port” in the sentence.

@kira

Links to a person rather than a page, and notifies them.

A link to a page nobody has written renders red rather than broken, and clicking it opens the editor with the title already filled in. That is deliberate: on a wiki a red link is not an error, it is a note to somebody that this thing deserves a page. Write about a town and link the family that runs it, the war it lost and the road out of it, and you have left three specific jobs behind you.

Those red links are collected. Wanted & orphans lists every page the wiki has been asked for and does not have, most-wanted first — which is the campaign telling you what to write next without being asked. The same screen lists the opposite failure: pages that exist and that nothing links to, which is usually where the forgotten things are.

At the bottom of every page, What links here shows the other way round.

The box down the side of a page is a list of label-and-value rows you write yourself — Ruled by, Population, Status. There is no fixed schema, and the order you put them in is the order they appear, because on a page about a person the order of the facts is itself a statement about them.

Put a [[link]] in an infobox value and it does two jobs: it links, and it gives the lore graph an edge it can label. Ruled by: [[Alderman Voss]] is why the graph can say ruled by rather than just drawing a line.

Tags group pages across the wiki and can be filtered from the index. The summary is the line that appears under the title in listings and search results — one sentence, written for somebody who has not read the page.

A page can be marked GM-only. That is not a lock — the page is absent from a player’s listings, from their search results and from the backlinks of everything it links to. There is nothing for them to notice.

A page can also be locked, which is different: everybody can still read it, and only the people running the campaign can edit it.

Every edit is kept as a revision with its author and the note they left. The history screen compares any two versions line by line, added against removed, and defaults to showing the newest edit against the one before it.

Reverting adds to the history rather than erasing it. Restoring last week’s version writes a new revision that happens to contain last week’s text — so a bad edit stays visible in the record and so does the fact that somebody undid it. There is no version of this site in which an edit quietly stops having happened.

Recent changes is the wiki-wide feed of that. You can also watch a single page and be notified when anybody edits it.

Each page has a talk section underneath it. It is for the arguments — whether the baron is dead, whether that date is right, whether this should be two pages — which otherwise end up as parenthetical asides inside the article itself.

A drawing of how the world hangs together, built from links rather than maintained by anybody. Infobox fields give an edge its meaning; plain mentions in the body give it weight. Click a node to walk to it.

It is worth opening once the wiki is thirty pages deep, mostly for what it shows you is not connected to anything.

Everything you write here is visible to your campaign and to nobody else. That is the default and it does not change on its own. But a Minecraft server recruiting players, or a GM trying to talk somebody into a game, has the opposite problem: the world is the argument, and nobody outside can see it.

So a page can be published — readable at a public address by anyone at all, search engines included. It takes two deliberate switches and both start off. One is per campaign, in settings, and only the owner has it. The other is on each page, for owners and moderators. A page is public only when both are on, so nothing is ever exposed because somebody forgot about it.

A GM-only page can never be published, whatever else is switched on — and making a published page GM-only un-publishes it rather than leaving the setting sitting there meaning nothing. Turning the campaign switch off closes everything at once without forgetting which pages you chose: turn it back on and you are exactly where you were.