Feed The Beast Wiki:Getting started

Welcome to the Feed The Beast Wiki! If you are interested in contributing to this wiki, you are in the right place; this guide is meant to get you up and editing like a pro.

This guide doesn't go over translation! If you want to translate content to other languages, please view the Translation Guide!

Why help?
Why should I help the Feed The Beast Wiki? A fine question.

The FTB Wiki has a lot of mod documentation. We have thousands of pages covering hundreds of mods... but there's actually still a ton to do. According to OpenEye, there are 15,408 (as of this date) total Minecraft mods (the real number is even higher; although a fair amount of the mods in OpenEye are repeats and test mods, OpenEye doesn't take into account the thousands of older mods, non-Minecraft Forge mods, mods with the same IDs, and mods that just haven't been played with OpenEye for that matter (most users don't use OpenEye)). With tens of thousands of mods, there are hundreds of thousands of items and other potential pages that are missing documentation. And, unfortunately, mod authors release new features and new mods much faster than they are documented here. We aren't going to ask you to sink all of your time into documentation, because well, you certainly could.

Since there is an infinitely growing amount of gameplay, the editors of the FTB Wiki generally focus on documenting particular mods of their choosing, often based off of popularity, inclusion in modpacks and user preference. This means that the mod you like or use may be very far back in the ever-growing "ultimate documentation TODO list". But if you ever wished a mod could be properly documented, the best way to satisfy that wish is to start documenting it. Heck, you will probably find help along the way.

We will be honest to you; documenting mods isn't a ton of fun for everyone. It really isn't if you don't have a passion for encyclopedic/technical writing; especially for beginners unfamiliar with the technical aspects of the wiki. However, contributing to something, helping other users, learning and working hard are all very rewarding. There's a lot to do, and a lot of benefit that can come from helping crack the documentation of the mod ecosystem.

Common misconceptions

 * The Feed The Beast Wiki is for FTB mods only. This is not true! At one point in time, this was true, but that is something that changed long ago. Mods like GregTech 6, The Mists of RioV, ArmorPlus, Aether II and AcademyCraft have all enjoyed documentation here.
 * Only FTB Wiki Staff can edit the FTB Wiki. This is not true! However, this was true in the very early stages of the wiki, when the wiki was still being formed, but it is a clause that was changed quite a long time ago, as you can probably tell by the "Edit" button in the toolbar.
 * It is true, however, that most of the edits and documentation on this wiki were created by staff or former staff. As it happens, most users that stick around long enough and contribute quality information become staff at some point.

Basic wiki help
For this guide, we expect you to at least have a basic understanding of MediaWiki and "wikitext". However, don't worry if you don't! Several resources exist to help, including the MediaWiki Wiki and Gamepedia's Help Wiki. If you're unfamiliar with wikis, it's highly recommended that you take a little bit of time to browse through those resources before continuing.

Your first item/block page
On this wiki, about 90% of the articles are copied from existing pages. Why? It's simple- the formatting on 90% of all articles are generally structured the same. Below is a boilerplate of the wikitext in an "average" page.

Dirt is a block added by the Vanilla mod.

Recipe
(this will produce this, although note the navigation box and categories are cut out)

Components
This simple page is made of only a few parts:
 * The infobox (Infobox). An infobox gives basic information on the block or item. You may notice another template being used in this section- Gc. More will be expanded about grids later.
 * The lead section. This may, in fact, be the only section, but it is almost always the most important. According to the Article creation guideline, the lead section should describe almost all of the info described in the initial infobox.
 * The recipe section. Rather than using screenshots, this wiki has many special templates for displaying crafting recipes. Again, more will be expanded about grids later.
 * The footer. This includes the navbox ("navigation box"), categories and a language bar.

Variantions
As it happens, different editors have different formatting styles. The more notable variations are listed here.
 * Section headers: two spaces are often used inside of no spaces, like in  as verse  . This called "2space style", with no spaces being called "wiktionary style".
 * The footer- various components of the footer are often scrunched together, as in below.


 * "Stacked" categories- as in below.

It is encouraged you use whatever variations you find to be more aesthetically pleasing, and to experiment.

Your first mod page
Below is a boilerplate of the wikitext in an "average" mod page. You may notice it's somewhat similar to the block/item page.

Vanilla is a mod created by Mojang.

Components
This simple page is made of only a few parts: You may notice it's very similar to the block/item page.
 * The infobox (Infobox mod).
 * The lead section.
 * The external links section. This should contain any important or useful links.
 * The footer.

Variations
All of the variations in the last section apply here.

Infobox
An infobox is a table-like template that appears in the top right corner of almost all standard pages. It is used to provide quick information, and it's sometimes used for the creation of automatically generated lists. The most common infoboxes are Infobox and Infobox mod. Infobox is used on block pages, item pages, entity pages, concept pages and other pages that don't have specific infoboxes. Infobox mod, Infobox biome, Infobox author, etc., are more specific. A full list of infoboxes can be found here.

An example infobox can seen below-

On some wikis, infoboxes are invoked with spaces between the parameter name, equals sign, and the value. However, this is not considered a proper convention here.

Infobox templates (or at least most of them) are created using Lua modules, like this. Since many infoboxes are used on hundreds or even thousands of pages, a few of the infoboxes modules are protected from editing by regular users, so any desired changes may need to be requested on the corresponding talk page.

All of the parameters an infobox can take are listed on their documentation page (like Template:Infobox/doc). The Feed The Beast Wiki is very good at maintaining documentation of our templates, and in fact almost all templates have a complete documentation page. It's worth noting the infobox doc is generated through the corresponding module, although the docs for other templates may not be.

Lead section
The lead section is just that, the lead section. It introduces the article, and it sometimes is the only section. Often it is the only "content" section.

Usually the first sentence gives a simple definition of the page, like "Dirt is a block added by the Vanilla mod". The title/subject is in bold ( Dirt ), and links are added where useful ( Vanilla ). Usually for block and item pages, the first sentence has the syntax of "  is a added by ". For mod pages, the first sentence usually has the syntax of "  is a mod created by ". This first sentence, however, is certainly not concrete to this syntax.

The rest of the lead section contains the rest of the most importation information on the article, or all of the information if it is a small article (as most articles are). Very large articles should be broken up into sections if possible.

Recipe
The recipe section gives the recipe of the block/item. The Crafting grid guide tells you pretty much everything you need to know, but we'll summarize it here.

Rather than using screenshots, we use crafting grid (Cg) templates to display recipes. The recipe section usually contains at least one Cg template, like below.

Each Cg template starts with "Cg/". Cg/Crafting Table is the most used Cg template, but there many others, like Cg/Furnace and Cg/Macerator. A full list can found here.

Each grid in a crafting device has a corresponding grid in a Cg template. In the case shown above, there are ten grids- 9 for the input (A1-C3) and 1 for the output (O). In the Crafting Table Cg, letters are used for marking the columns and numbers are used for marking the rows. The order is A1 to C3 and then O, and then the "shapeless" parameter if necessary. Any empty slots should be skipped over (like done with B2 above).

The template Gc is used for each individual grid/item. Usually it has three parameters- the mod, disambiguation and the name of the item. The mod abbreviation is defined by Module:Mods/list. The "dis" parameter, when set to true (which it is per default) will change the link to add " (Vanilla)" (or whatever the mod name is) to the end of the it. The item name is just that.

The template O is often used instead of Gc. It is used for Ore Dictionary entries. It only takes only one parameter, the Ore Dictionary name. A list of these can found here and defined here. Currently, only staff can add Ore Dictionary entries, but if you post a request they'll probably respond fairly quickly.

Footer
The footer is made of three parts- the navbox, the categories, and the langbar. You can probably guess which part is which.

Navbox stands for navigation box. Navboxes are used on almost all pages.

Categories are a feature added by MediaWiki used to make special indexes/lists of pages (see Help:Categories for more info). Category hierarchy has a mostly complete list of all the categories. Make sure to not add your pages to any "top level" categories- categories that are used to categorize categories, but not to categorize articles, like.

Lastly is the langbar, or language bar. It doesn't really do anything in an article if the article is not marked for translation, but we usually include it anyway.

And one more thing before you go
This guide doesn't go over everything you could ever need to know about wiki editing. A lot of it you'll have to learn just by experience. But, if you need help, feel free to ask around. Someone in the community will make sure help is granted when requested.

If you want to experiment, feel free to play around in the wiki's Sandbox or in your own personal Sandbox. Lastly, it's highly recommended that you look through a few more of the guides and guidelines, and maybe a few other pages of interest, if you have the patience.

Don't be shy to edit and have fun!