Tolkien Gateway

Tolkien Gateway:Welcome

Revision as of 17:17, 10 January 2011 by Mithbot (Talk | contribs)

Mae govannen.

Welcome! Tolkien Gateway is a an encylopedia which aims to document anything and everything related to the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Like Wikipedia it is written and maintained by volunteers, and anyone is encouraged to edit its content.

If you're looking for something in particular the place to start is the search box in the top right-hand corner of your browser screen. If not you are bound to find something interesting by following the links on the main page or clicking random page on the side bar.

Everything you see has been written by volunteers and is always expanding. If you see a mistake or omission in any of our articles you we strongly encourage you to be bold and edit it (by clicking the button at the top of the article). If you would like to contribute further this page will provide you with a starting point; it contains links to various help articles and lists of things which need doing.

How to edit

See also Help:Contents

Tolkien Gateway runs on MediaWiki so if you've ever edited Wikipedia or similar wikis you'll find it works much the same.

You can edit (almost) any article by clicking the "edit" button at the top of the page. There you'll see a text box with the text of the article and some wikitext. Wikitext is a markup language which is used to create links, format text and do lots of other things on MediaWiki sites. You'll find a quick introduction to wikitext at Help:Editing. You can experiment in the Sandbox.

After you've learnt the basics of wikitext you should probably familiarise yourselves with Tolkien Gateway's standards. These aren't rules but guidelines that are designed to make articles consistent and easy to use. There's quite a lot of them so don't worry too much about it right now, if you make a mistake somebody else will catch it later. But it's something to keep in mind.

What to edit

See also: Tolkien Gateway:Community Portal

No article is perfect so there's always something to do on Tolkien Gateway. Try hitting random page and seeing what you can improve.

There are various ways to find articles which need improvement:

Finally there are a few projects which have their own lists of open tasks:


If you're stuck with anything, feel free to ask on this article's talk page or ask another member on their talk page.