How to contribute

What to contribute?

We encourage every kind of contribution. Here are a few examples what you could do:

• You can always fix problems, correct grammar, make sure wording is accurate, etc. (See Editing Pages)
• Expand an article by covering another topic
• Create videos for articles (How to create videos)
• Write a new article. Topics includes a variety of topics yet to cover

Moderation

Changes made to the wiki go to a moderation queue, where moderators will check if the change you made is vandalism.

Here are our practices we follow when moderating content, which the extension itself recommends:

Recommended use / good practices when moderating

The following good-practices are advised:

1. Only vandalism should be Rejected. Not-so-good edits with good intentions (e.g. adding excessive plot details into the Wikipedia article about film) are better made Approved and then reverted as usual. This way the author is not offended and the text is saved in page history, viewable by anyone.
2. Any user that is deemed legitimate (does N good edits) should be added into automoderated group.
3. Adding users to automoderated group via $wgAutopromote is NOT recommended, as it motivates the vandals to do many very-minor edits (e.g. adding interwiki). Better promote them to automoderated manually for one good edit and not promote for 30 useless-edits-made-for-count.
4. Abstain from using blocks. Don't protect pages "just in case", except maybe for important templates.
5. Allow the full rehabilitation of users with a bad history of editing. Their useful edits to the articles should be allowed, no matter how many times they were blocked. At the same time, trolling on talk pages should be rejected, so are the purposely-low-quality edits.

How to create a video

(TODO: Update this section to be usable on the new wiki)

Step 1: Getting a Map

Variant 1: Using an existing map

To use maps from videos in the wiki:

1. Right-click the video and click ‘View Video’, now you can find the name of the video in the URL
2. Go here and download the correct demo
3. Open the demo in your client (you need to move the demo into your data/maps folder)
4. While you have the demo open, go into the editor, click File, and select Load Current Map

Now you can edit and use the map for the demo.

Variant 2: Creating a new map

1. Create a new map in the editor
2. Set the background color to #5E84AE
   1. Click on the quads layer
   2. Right-click the corners of the rectangle
   3. Insert the color value #5E84AE into the third to last field each each
3. The main focus should be that it is comprehensible
4. Keep the style simple and similar to the other videos
   • Use simple textures (preferably grass_main, combined with generic_unhookable and font_teeworlds)
   • Make it loopable, you can get creative with that :)
   • Insert a scale if suited

Step 2.1: Recording the demo

1. Turn demo recording on
   • I suggest Settings -> General -> Automatically record demos
2. Load the map on a server
   • Start your own DDNet server or use the Trashmap hosting service
3. Join it with your client, try the trick until you are satisfied with the result and keep loopability in mind

Recording Settings

Set consistent skin:

• Hammer: brownbear
• Pistol: coala
• Shotgun: cammo
• Grenade: redstripe
• Laser: bluestripe
• Hook: default
• Jump: bluekitty

Step 2.2: Cutting the demo

1. In your client, go to Demos -> auto/
2. Open the demo you recorded
   • Tip: Click on Date to sort by date
3. Press Escape for demo functions
4. Use the 2 buttons on the left of the camera icons to select a starting and end point
5. Use the camera icon to save the shortened demo

Tip: you can repeat these steps multiple times to be able to cut the demo more precisely

Converting the demo

Once you have the client, converting a demo is as simple as:

• Open the client (with the converting functionality)
• Set zoom to 10: cl_default_zoom 10
• Go to the Demos tab
• Select the correct demo
• Click Render at the bottom

Step 4: Cropping the video

Now that we have our video, we will now want to crop it down, so that only the relevant area of it is shown. For this exact process we have created the crop.sh script. You can find it in /scripts/crop.sh.

To use it:

1. First edit the crop.sh script to set the PIXEL_PER_TILE value correctly!
2. Use it as a commandline tool:
   • The first argument is the input video file
   • The second argument is the output video file
   • The third to sixth arguments are each, how many tiles upwards/downwards/to the left/to the right should be seen in the video
3. Try different settings to get the best result
4. Remember to include the exact command you used in the commit message, as well as your PIXEL_PER_TILE value!

Step 5: Creating a merge request for the repository

You don’t have to be familiar with git to create a merge request:

1. Go to the folder view
2. Click on the drop-down menu next to the videos folder
3. Click Upload file
4. Upload all relevant files this way, for each video include the .demo
5. Click on the blue button Commit...
6. Write into the ‘Commit Message’ what you are changing (e.g. which video you are adding)
7. Insert the crop command(s) you used from step 4!
8. Create a new branch; it should be selected by default, if not, tick it
9. Press the green button ‘Commit’

Step 6: Insert videos in pages

See About for how to edit pages. Adding {{% vid vid-name %}} to markdown pages includes /video/vid-name.mp4 in the HTML page.

Templates

If you identify a common occurrence, such as weapon info boxes, you can automate it creating templates, more info here.

List of created templates:

Category:Templates