Help:FAQ

This is a help page, intended to help users learn. Be very sure that any prospective edits are informative and correct. If in doubt, discuss on the talk page.

This is the FAQ page for Xeno Series Wiki. It doesn't really have any actual "frequently-asked questions"; it's more a guess as to what questions are likely to be most relevant to new users.

Basic wiki stuff

What is this place?

This is a wiki (publicly-editable encyclopedia) focused on the Xeno series (a loosely-related series of video games that happen to share themes and a title that starts with "Xeno").

Isn't there a pretty complete wiki about this series already?

There are such wikis on the Wikia/Fandom wikifarm. They may be older or more complete than we are, that is true. But a lot of people don't like how Wikia/Fandom runs things, while others just like the idea of an independent wiki better anyway. It also means we get to be in the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance, which is cool.

How can I help?

There's a few easy ways.

• Check out the Main Page. There's a bunch of fancy-coloured boxes that list out articles known to need improvement in some way - maybe they're too short, or need better images, or have text in another language that needs an English translation.
• Check out Special:RecentChanges. You'll see what other people have done recently, so you can check their spelling, grammer, or facts. The above category boxes are here too.
• Just wander around. Click links to pages that look interesting, look for stuff in the search bar, poke Special:Random, until you find a page you feel like contributing to.

Can I copy stuff from another wiki or fansite and add it here?

We'd rather you not, if only because when search engines see two identical blocks of text, they'll probably prefer the older one (i.e. not us). Also, while many wikis operate under the "you can copy this if you attribute it correctly" principle, not all do (or have bonus extra rules), and other fansites might be rightly upset about being plagarised. Official art is probably fine, though it'd be nice if you could get it from the original source instead. Screenshots are also okay if sourced properly, though again it'd be better to create our own.

You spoiled me! Why didn't you have a spoiler warning?

We do. It's a big red box at the top of every page on the wiki unless you log in and explicitly click the "dismiss" link (which hides it for a month or less, then it comes back). It's not worth our time to read over every page on the wiki and decide what is or isn't worthy of a spoiler tag. And even if we did, we can't guarantee that someone has edited in a spoiler where it shouldn't be that no one else has noticed yet. We do what we can to stop this, but you still have to be careful about it.

Main article: Xeno Series Wiki:Spoiler policy

How come it seems like [this game] has so many more pages/content than [other game]?

Most editors will only have enough knowledge to contribute to the pages on one or two games of the series, and they are likely to be biased towards the most recent entries. That's just how it is unfortunately.

Why did someone else ruin my edit?

That depends on how hyperbolic you're being about "ruin". Maybe the thing you were trying to do could have been done a better way, and a more experienced editor has done so. Maybe you had a good idea but someone else undid it because they know the history of why we don't do it that way. Or maybe we have vandals that just mess up other peoples' stuff because they're garbo. Before assuming the worst, check the page's "View history" tab to see if they left an edit summary to explain themselves.

I want to fill in some info, but all these templates use funny numbers instead of useful text, what do I do?

If the game in question is well-researched enough, we might set our templates to take the actual numbers from the game as input, which results in this. The template's documentation should explain where its values come from. If you still don't understand, you can always reach out to a knowledgable editor for help.

Alternatively, you can simply fill in what you know in however format you wish, and mark your edit with Template:Data needed. This will signal to others that this page requires technical attention.

I've filled in some info, but nothing's changed, what did I do wrong?

Chances are that the thing you expected to change has not yet realized a change has been made, because the wiki doesn't necessarily do all such updates at once. Try previewing the target page or making a null edit (saving an edit that makes no changes) to see if that works. If not, maybe you made a mistake with your original edit, or maybe the wiki's busy doing other stuff right now.

This article says "undefined [something]" in it, what's that about?

If a template is expecting a number from 0 to 10, but it's given 18 or "bleh", what's it supposed to do? We've decided on a standard of it displaying "undefined [18]" or "undefined [bleh]", so editors are aware that something's not right and can investigate.

What's this symbol ※ in articles mean?

This is the "reference mark" symbol. We use it in situations where a subject has more information available, but it's an "extra data" page instead of a proper article, so we don't want to make it a regular text-based link. Having a unique symbol gets across the notion that something about it is different, so the reader can hopefully better understand why they went to a page that isn't a real page.

Wiki appearance

The light hurts my eyes. Can you darken the skin?

If you create an account, you can enable a dark theme in your preferences. (MediaWiki doesn't allow for setting skins/themes for no-account users.) Each skin has a dark theme available. You can take a peek at dark theme here.

This part of the dark theme isn't dark, why not?

It is not easy to coerce MediaWiki (the base wiki system) or Semantic MediaWiki (a data extension) into presenting a dark-background-light-text appearance - there's always something that assumes otherwise and glows in the dark. Take a screenshot and hand it to a staff member, and we'll try to figure out how to fix it. If you can also supply the relevant HTML of the page, even better, that makes the investigation easier.

However, some parts of Semantic MediaWiki are coded as essentially "I'm white and that's more important than whatever you want". This means literally nothing can be done about it.

What if I don't like either theme?

Users can write their own custom theme. For details, see Xeno Series Wiki:Custom theming.

I got an error page and it's light theme only, why?

Error pages such as "server too busy" are handled by the website host entirely outside of the wiki's control. This means they have no access to your chosen theme, so they're designed to match the default (light) theme.

Why does stuff look broken? Also I'm viewing the wiki on a phone.

Mobile browsers do a lot of things that make it actively difficult for us to make things work/look fine there. We'll do what we can to fix such issues, if you can document and report them. Regardless, wikis are recommended to view in desktop mode in general, especially for things like wide tables or fancy maps.

I loaded a page and it's totally blank, not even a logo, what happened?

This is something that can happen if work is being done behind the scenes and something breaks. Usually it's noticed within seconds and the problem is reverted, so just wait a short time and try again.

Why are peoples' names in change lists different colours with underlines?

This is a feature intended to help people see who's a staff member. If you don't like it, you can turn off "Highlight wiki staff user links with a different color per group" in your Gadget preferences.

In general:

• Dashed underlines are for users who aren't staff but have some extra powers.
• Solid underlines are for users who are staff members.
• Double underlines are for staff members who also have control over who is a staff member.
• Wavy underlines are for bots.

More detailed wiki stuff

What's this weird icon in the search bar?

In an attempt to reduce the chances of spoiling readers by seeing "Good Guy (final boss)" in the search suggestions dropdown when they're searching for "Good Guy", we turned the dropdown off by default. However, this is still a very useful thing to have, so if you're willing to take the risk, we allow you to turn it back on. This weird icon controls that: shows when it's off, and shows when it's on. (It's a bit broken on some pages and won't show either. We don't know why. It should still behave as you last set it.)

I uploaded a new version of an image, but it didn't change, or is now stretched. What gives?

The website shouldiblamecaching.com explains.

More seriously, your browser is basically assuming that images don't change, and so only ever shows you the old version instead of asking the wiki what the new version is. Usually this is a good thing, but in this case you actually do want to re-download the image. You can do this with a "hard refresh" or "cache clear", and is usually done by holding Ctrl (or equivalent) and hitting the refresh button. See Wikipedia's page on the subject for more details.

Why is the article counter on the main page lower than in the statistics?

The counter on the main page adjusts the number by removing all disambiguation pages (pages that aren't articles themselves, but lists of articles that share the same name). They are articles on a technical level, but don't make sense to be considered as such, so we subtract that count from the main page counter. By contrast, we can't change how Special:Statistics or the API count the amount of articles, so the disambig pages will be counted there.