Contribution Guidelines

We'd welcome your contribution to make this wiki better! Here's how.

Editing an Existing Page

Editing an existing page is easy.

• First, familiarize yourself with the wiki's Tips and Conventions.
• You'll find an "Edit" button at the top right corner of this page. Click on that to open Github's built-in editor filled with the page's content.
• Make your changes. We ask that you use the default Markdown syntax for consistency with the rest of the content.
• When you are done, fill in some kind of "Edit message" like "Added link to YouTube video" or "Fixed a typo", and then click "Save page"

Creating a New Page

If you are thinking of creating a new page of content, take a second to ask yourself if your contribution might fit in with some of the existing pages. We'd like to have fewer pages with related content in them than a large number of pages with only bits of info in each.

Creating a new page is a little more involved than a simple page edit.

• First, familiarize yourself with the wiki's Tips and Conventions
• In the top right corner of the wiki, you should see a red "New Page" button. Click that and you should get to "Create new page".

Important

Don't save this page you're looking at right now under a new name and edit its contents or you'll wipe it out.

• Give the page an appropriate title of a few words so it will fit into the sidebar. Our standard format is to capitalize each word in the title.
  • Behind the scenes, Github will replace any spaces in the title with hyphens, so "Help Wanted" becomes "Help-Wanted". The latter name will be used when we get to adding the page to the sidebar later
  • Even further behind the scenes, Github will add a ".md" extension to the file name. You'll only see this if you clone this repo and work on it locally. Normally you won't need to worry about this.
• Add your content, flipping back and forth between the editor's Write and Preview tabs to get the formatting right. Again, we ask that you use the default Markdown syntax for consistency with the rest of the content.
• When you are done, fill in some kind of "Edit message" like "Initial page creation" or "Fixed a typo", and then click "Save page"

You've created a page. Good job! It should show up if you expand the "Pages" button near the top right side of the wiki.

Adding the New Page to the Sidebar

This wiki uses a custom sidebar to organize the information rather than Github's default of showing the list in alphabetical order. To add your new page to the sidebar...

• Click the pencil icon to the right of the "Visual Pinball Wiki" on the wiki sidebar.
• Add your page to an appropriate spot within the sidebar using Markdown syntax. It will look something like [My Page Title](My-Page-Title) (remember how Github replaces spaces in file names with hyphens?). If you aren't sure what the file name is, you can hover your cursor over the file that shows up under the "Pages" button.
• Flip back and forth between the "Write" and "Preview" buttons to get things looking right.
• Finally, add an appropriate "Edit Message" and click "Save Page".

Tips & Conventions

• Unless it is some introductory text, we try to stick with using "VPX" instead of "vpinball" or "visual pinball" or whatever.
• Don't use hyphenation in your file names when creating a new file. That tends to mess things up because Github seems to replace those hyphens with Unicode instead. A title like "Fix Broken Tables" is better than "Fix Non-Working Tables"
• Interested in following the changes to this wiki? Github doesn't advertise this but you can do that with https://github.com/dekay/vpinball-wiki/wiki.atom in your favorite RSS reader (e.g. Feedbro in Firefox).