Blooncyclopedia:How to help

Want to start contributing to Blooncyclopedia? We'd love your help! Here's a guide for those new to editing.

The basic principles

• Give the style guide and FAQ a read before you start making major additions or changes.
• Be bold! As long as you're acting in good faith, anything you add is likely to do more good than harm, and you won't learn without trying. Everyone makes mistakes, they're part of the learning process, and are easy to forgive. Even if you mess up royally, your changes can always be undone, no harm no foul.
• While you can edit most articles without logging in, you won't be able to edit strategy articles and your edits will be attributed to your IP address, which will be visible to everyone. Creating an account will hide your IP address and allow you to become autoconfirmed, which will allow you to create new articles, edit more kinds of articles, and upload files.
  • If you want to create a new page, but aren't autoconfirmed yet, you can create it in the general sandbox page first. Once you become autoconfirmed, you can copy its contents to an article in the main space.

Where do I start?

Some editors like to dive in solo and make improvements wherever they see fit, others like to coordinate through our Discord server and our forums. Here are a few beginner-friendly ways to start helping out:

• Ease yourself in by making small improvements, such as fixing typos and adding missing categories.
• Fill in short articles and empty/incomplete sections. Are there any Bloons games or subjects that you're knowledgeable about and Blooncyclopedia is sorely lacking coverage of? See our maintenance categories for articles that need filling out:
  • Category:Article stubs - articles that are short and missing general information
  • Category:Bot-generated articles that need expansion - articles created by Pymonkibot that have all the technical information they need but are missing prose, such as intro summaries
  • Category:Articles with incomplete sections - articles with sections that need additional information
  • Category:Articles with empty sections - articles with sections yet to be written
• Browse the recent changes log. It gives an idea of what other editors are doing, and what areas of the wiki need expanding on. You can see the specific changes made in each edit by clicking on the "diff" button.
• View the talk pages to see what other editors are discussing. You can see the talk page for an article by clicking on the "talk" tab at the top of the screen (on desktop) or tapping the "discussion" tab below the article's title (on mobile).

Once you become autoconfirmed, you can also help out by uploading screenshots. They're relatively easy to create and the wiki needs a lot of them. See the screenshot guidelines for information on what kinds of screenshots are needed and how to compose them, and see Category:Articles that need screenshots for a list of articles that need screenshots.

How do I edit?

To start editing an article, click the "edit" tab near the top-right of the screen (desktop) or the icon that looks like a pencil (mobile). Blooncyclopedia is powered by MediaWiki, so articles are created and edited with wikitext. You can always look things up on MediaWiki's website if you need more information.

• Help:Editing basics - general editing help
• Help:Links - creating links within article text like this
• Help:Tables - creating and editing tables
• Help:Images - uploading images and adding them to articles
• Help:Galleries - creating and editing galleries
• Help:Categories - creating and adding to categories (those links at the bottom of the page that aren't visible on mobile normally because MobileFrontend sucks)

Advanced

• Help:Templates - creating and editing templates
• Help:Modules - creating and writing Lua scripts
• Help:Cargo - working with Cargo so Cargo can do all the work for you

What are those article names with colons for?

Blooncyclopedia uses several custom namespaces for organization and to control the suggestions that appear under the search box (so searching "Dart Monkey" only lists the main articles, and not a dozen subpages, for example). For new editors, it is recommended that you stick to only the main namespace (e.g. articles without a namespace prefix), strategy articles, and gallery articles.

For more information, and more namespaces, see Help:Namespaces.

Namespace	Purpose	Example
(main)	Subjects in general, or subjects in specific games/series	Quincy, Quincy (BTD6)
Stats	Stats for a subject (these articles are usually generated by scripts, editing them by hand is not recommended)	Stats:Quincy (BTD6)
Strategy	Community-crafted tips, tricks, and strategies for using a subject	Strategy:Quincy (BTD6)
Update history	Changes made to a subject in game updates	Update history:Quincy (BTD6)
Gallery	Collections of images for a subject for easy browsing	Gallery:Quincy