Guidelines On Page Creation

Starting a page

Here's what [Wikipedia] has to say on starting new pages:

If you like, you can enter just a line or two of text for an entry. It's a start. Full-blown articles are not required. Adding any (accurate, helpful) information is welcome! Of course, if you can write more, that's all the better.

How you word your articles will determine, to some extent, how likely it is other people will work on it. Examples:
An article that leaves many intriguing-sounding links or leaves ellipses (...), etc., might invite other know-it-alls to fill in the blanks.

Straightforward requests for information in an article can lead to good articles.

Do a search to see if the topic is already covered somewhere else.

Page Names

"how to" pages

Tarquin: These are currently names "Creating a skybox", "creating subclasses", "making a 2D shape". Lately, I've ended up writing links like "see [Creating a skybox]? for more". It seems to me that it would be easier if we could write:

 Create a subclass with the script below...
 or
 We'll need a place for the lightning, so [create a skybox]? and...

See Basic Procedure for more on this naming scheme.

Subtopic Names

When you're describing a subtopic of a larger topic, make that page a subpage by linking to it as MainPage/SubPage (or just /SubPage on the MainPage itself). That'll provide an extra link to the main page on all sub pages, and it helps to keep the articles structured. For instance, if you add a page describing techniques using MeshMaker, call that page MeshMaker/Techniques?. One major benefit of this type of organization is that search results are displayed with their topic/sub-topic relationships apparent (for example, search on the keyword 'Actor' and see how sub-topics of Actor are indented under the main topic.
However, it's best to only do this when the subtopic won't need to be linked from elsewhere.

See also subtopic discussion

a page on UseModWiki on using subpages: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SubPage

Page Links

In brief: once you have created a page, go forth and find places to link to it. Put relevant links on the page too. Guidelines on Page Links has more suggestions on this.

Refactoring

Redirect Pages

Consider the benefits of creating redirect pages for any alternative wordings of the topic you've created. If you do this, you reduce the potential of someone creating a page concerning the same topic but unaware that your page exists.