Guild Wars Wiki:Be bold

This page is an accepted guideline on the Guild Wars Wiki. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all contributors should follow. Before editing this page, it is suggested to gather consensus on the talk page first.

If you can make an article better, go ahead and save your changes.

Be BOLD!

Guild Wars Wiki encourages all users to correct obvious mistakes and make improvements! If you can improve an article, please go ahead. This applies especially in the case of minor changes, such as adding an appropriate link, using a standard template, adding an existing image, correcting spelling, typos, grammar, or making sure a page adheres to the formatting guidelines. All of these can easily be handled by anyone with a quick look at the help pages. And don't be worried that you might have spelled a word incorrectly, or worded a sentence poorly. Someone will come along and easily fix it.

If you have (or can get) a screenshot or map that we need, crop it and upload the image, using the link in the 'toolbox' section to the left. Some of the articles even show you the appropriate name of the image you should upload, so it's very easy to get involved.

Any change you make may attract the attention of other active editors, drawing more eyes onto a particular section of an article that may otherwise be overlooked or ignored. Changes you make will show up as recent changes, so you can be mostly assured that someone will double-check your edit. You can assist them by quickly explaining what you changed in the summary field beneath the main editing frame, and using the preview function before saving your changes.

Don't mind the reverts

Sometimes bold changes will be changed again. Maybe the change got reverted because it does not follow our policies or guidelines, maybe some minor detail was corrected or maybe someone else decided to be bold as well. Don't be discouraged by this. Often the best part of bold changes is that they lead to an even better change after additional discussions or clarifications. They can show other editors a different point of view, and get them involved in a page they'd previously not thought of changing.

If you disagree with any edits or reverts, take the issue to the talk page and ask the other editors for their reasons. Do not feel personally attacked by a revert, other editors are trying to help the wiki, just as you are.

...but don't get reckless

While we encourage users to continually improve the wiki, we still want articles that are correct. The preview feature, in addition to letting you check for errors in your edit, is also the quickest way to spot technical problems or red links before saving your changes, and is your best tool in keeping your edits bold rather than reckless.

Not all parts of the wiki are easily reverted when bold editors make changes. For technical reasons, actions such as renaming articles, creating categories, or editing templates can be difficult or time consuming to revert. Well-intended edits to the building blocks of the wiki can accidentally cause issues on dozens or even hundreds of pages, especially as some templates are very complex and difficult to change even for an experienced user.

When you can't be bold, don't be afraid to ask for help instead. If you're not sure of how to make a change, feel free to ask on the article's talk page. You can also draft the change in one of your user pages, possibly also asking other users to view the proposal, to make sure everything is fine before making the actual changes.