A Guide to NSWiki
NOTE: As of September 2019, due to a technical issue, TEP is transitioning to https://tep.miraheze.org. An updated guide will be coming soon but the only information to disregard is the NSWiki references but the infobox and other information is valid. Please see a member of RP staff for any assistance.
You have probably heard of NSWiki- the place where a lot of us store all of our nation data, character data, and other things like business pages and the likes. It is generally overlooked because at first glance, it makes no sense. I’m here to break this down for you and make this transition from dull forum factbooks to fantastic Wikipedia style pages!
Firstly, you’re going to want to go to the site. Click http://nswiki.org for a link, or copy and paste the url here: (http://nswiki.org). This will redirect you to the main page. You’re going to be hit with a lot of information that is normally a block for most people, but sit tight, I’m going to visually show you what you need to do. Click the spoiler to see what you need to do next.
[spoiler]https://i.imgur.com/smBthGk.png
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From here, click the “Login with Nationstates” that I have highlighted in the top right corner. This will take you to the login-authentication stage, which can confuse people, because it sure confused me when I first joined. What you need to do is enter your nation name from Nationstates- but not the full name, so in my case it is “Staynes” instead of “The Cartographer Guy of Staynes”, and at the same time you need to have yourself logged in to your nationstates nation on a separate tab. This will look something like this.
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https://i.imgur.com/oMzddEg.png
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Once you press “Locate Nation”, you should find an Authentication Code displays itself below. You’re going to need to copy and paste the entire code into the authentication box, and submit. If you’ve done all of the steps right, you’ve just successfully logged into nswiki and can progress to the next stage, congrats!
[/spoiler]
Once you have progressed past the login and authentication stages, you may be wondering “well, what now?”. In the top right corner is a search bar- simply search for the page you want to create. In my case, I would want to start with my country, so I would search for “Great Morstaybishlia”. This will take you to a list of results that match your search. Most likely you will find that this page doesn’t exist, which is exactly what we want. You should find a message reading “Create the page “(searched name)” on this wiki!”. Simply click the red link. It is not a requirement to use the format “Nation/(nationname)”, as “Nation/” will always appear in the title and it is really annoying.
You’ve made it to the writing stage. It is all good having a page with your writing, but it just doesn’t feel complete without the truly-Wikipedia style info boxes. The most common info box is the nation info box. I have provided a blank info box in the spoiler below. Feel free to copy and paste it into your text box and begin filling in the blanks. Most of it is self explanatory, but if you don’t understand what some of them mean, ask a cartographer on Discord or simply google it, your answers are one search away.
[spoiler]
{{Infobox country
|conventional_long_name =
|common_name =
|national_motto =
|national_anthem =
|image_flag =
|image_coat =
|flag_caption =
|image_map =
|loctext = Map
|alt_map =
|map_caption =
|image_map2 =
|alt_map2 =
|map_caption2 =
|capital =
|largest_city =
|languages_type =
|languages =
|languages2_type =
|languages2 =
|membership =
|membership_type =
|ethnic_groups =
|ethnic_groups_year =
|demonym =
|government_type =
|leader_title1 =
|leader_name1 =
|leader_title2 =
|leader_name2 =
|leader_title3=
|leader_name3 =
|legislature =
|upper_house =
|lower_house =
|established_event1 =
|established_date1 =
|area_km2 =
|area_sq_mi =
|population_estimate =
|population_estimate_year =
|population_census =
|population_census_year =
|population_density_km2 =
|population_density_sq_mi =
|GDP_nominal =
|GDP_nominal_year =
|GDP_nominal_per_capita =
|Gini =
|Gini_year =
|HDI_year =
|HDI =
|HDI_change =
|currency =
|currency_code =
| time_zone =
| utc_offset =
| utc_offset_DST =
| time_zone_DST =
|date_format =
|drives_on =
|calling_code =
|cctld =
|iso3166code =
}}
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Now you’ve filled in the statistics on the info box, but you may be unsure how to attach images. There is one way to do this and its fairly simple. Click the “Upload file” on the left hand side on the main page. From here it’s simple, just upload an image from your computer. An image too large won’t be able to upload, so make sure it’s generally scaled down to 1000x1000 pixels, give or take some. Continue and “Upload file” at the bottom. The page will refresh with an image and the title for the image which is formatted to “file:(image).png/svg/jpg/etc”. Copy all of the title except the “file:” and paste it into the image_flag of the info box and voila, it’s done.
An amazing thing about nswiki is that you can link other pages on your page by formatting the other page with two square brackets on either side, so it looks like “(page)]]”. It will appear as a blue hyperlink if the page exists, or a red hyperlink if the page doesn’t exist.
I’m going to include a few examples for you if you’d like inspiration for starting an nswiki article on a nation- click Great Morstaybishlia - NSWiki for my country, click Nation/Emberwood Coast - NSWiki for [mention]Ember[/mention]'s country, click Vekaiyu - NSWiki for [mention]Todd McCloud[/mention]'s country and click Axdel - NSWiki for [mention]Pagistar[/mention]'s country.
The next post I will talk about political figures and more table examples and the like. Enjoy!