Thread:Spooky Rish/@comment-5645428-20150128093447

Sorry if I brought you here thinking you'd received a promotion, but it's the promotions you received on other wikis which I'm here to talk to you about.

I've been an administrator on the Battle Bears Wiki, Infinity Blade Wiki and the Geometry Dash Wiki (and its international cousins if you can count those). I believe it is a person's motivation to help contribute to a community project that leads them to join a wiki, and the interaction with the community that keeps them interested. After all, if you knew no one ever saw the work you put in, why would you think it worthwhile? That was one of the reasons I winded down with the Battle Bears Wiki, and my motivation with the Infinity Blade Wiki dropped off when I realised it was almost too difficult to fix things up because the wiki was too large (content-wise) for my liking. That's why I landed here. I can spend time with individual members of the wiki and the wider community, and admin work doesn't have to be channelled all into maintenance. And so you can see why I enjoy being here so much.

I'm sure you have your own stories. Do tell me, if you like. The above I hope shows where you can find look to find fulfilment on your other wikis as an admin. And now, here's what all experienced Wikians come to learn with enough time and effort put in: coding.

Read from here if you want to skip straight to the practical stuff.

Learning coding for me never happened all in one day. It's impossible. The only real way to do it is learn it bit by bit, and not straight from an article, but pretty well immersing yourself in it where you can. That's what I've been doing since I gained adminship here, and have resolved every single issue I've had so far through my own determination and experimentation. Okay, enough of that, how do you do it?

On Wikia, you'll mainly be working with CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. You will find it for most wikis at MediaWiki:Wikia.css. You already know that's what you use to colour admin usernames, and that's virtually its objective, to colour stuff and shape stuff. How so? HTML, which is what defines the content of site, is selected through the use of 'classes' and 'IDs' to be styled using CSS. It wouldn't be fair if I didn't link you here. I'm unaware of a better site that can put to you all the attributes that you can manipulate with CSS. Don't expect to learn them all any time soon, it's an ongoing thing that you remember with experience.

.WikiaRail .module { border: 2px solid #FFF; color: #FFF; background: linear-gradient(to bottom, #0A0A0A, rgba(10, 10, 10, 0)); box-shadow: 0px 0px 10px #FFF; }

This is what is used to style the boxes in the right column on this wiki. '.WikiaRail .module' are classes, which always start with a '.' before the words. Sometimes you may see a '#' instead. It identifies an ID, which is virtually the same as a class. They are part of the selector, which is connected to the HTML you want to style. The border, color (text-colour), background and box-shadow are attributes. They are the code which brings life to the element.

But you might be wondering, how am I suppose to know what anything is? Right click, and select 'Inspect element' on anything within the webpage. On the presumption you're using Chrome, find and click the magnifying glass icon from the pane which just opened, and click on something on the page. It should then show you some code like I just showed you above. Highlight and copy the selector, like '.WikiHeader', and put that onto your Wikia.css page. Then, in between these "{ }", you can use your own attributes to style an element (a name for anything on a webpage) however you like. Remember to end each attribute line with a ';', or it won't work.

That's enough for now. Use the wikis you've gained adminship on to practice. Don't worry about mistakes. First off, all you need to do is see you changed something. From there, your career as a coder begins! 