Creating a Player Character Page

Creating a page for your player characters is pretty easy. Unfortunately it does require a bit of knowledge on how to create pages in a wiki. Hopefully the following will help with the process!

Creating the User Page

First, login to the Lorebook. The username and password for the lorebook is the same as the forum account. Turbine has graciously allowed anyone with an active game account (and thus a forum account) to have an account on the lorebook. Again, use the login and password used for the forum for the lorebook.

Once you are logged into the lorebook, you will see your username in a bar across the top of the page. "Username" "My Talk" "My preferences" "My watchlist" etc.

Click on your username. This will bring you to a page that says: "There is currently no text in this page, you can search for this page title in other pages or edit this page."

Click on "edit this page." You will now have an editing window on the screen. You can put most anything you want on the page (within the Terms of Service, of course, like the forum, and nothing copyrighted.) But for now, let's continue with creating the character pages.

Creating the Character Page

For this example, the username will be Hobo with the character names of Johnny and Allison. The userpage that was created in the step above will have the name: http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/User:Hobo in the URL in the address bar. The character pages will be subsets of that page.

Now, it is time to create the actual pages the character information will be on. Fortunately, wiki makes it real easy to add pages. All one has to do is put in a link to that page and if the page doesn't exist yet, when the link is clicked on a page like before will appear. You don't have to use the entire url, just the page itself. So to add links for Johnny and Allison, the following will be typed into the page:

[[User:Hobo/Johnny]]
[[User:Hobo/Allison]]

Then the page will be saved by clicking the "save page" button at the bottom. In Hobo's case, this will create a page with just those two links on it.

When saving pages in wikis, it is important to fill in the summary box. This lets anyone that looks at the history of a page know what was done when it was saved at that point. It's also a lot of help when looking at a page a couple months later. :) So type something like "initial page creation and links to PCs added" in the summary box and click on "save page".

(I'll show you how to make those links look nicer later.)

Now is where it gets fun!  :)

Adding the Template

Right now we want two browser windows open. With firefox, you can click on one of the links in your userpage and do "open link in new tab." Most browsers should be able to either open new tabs or windows. Go ahead and do so for one of those links.

Once that is done, goto this page:

http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Template:Player_Character

See the little "edit" next to the striped box? Click on that. This will open up an edit box for that section. Inside of that box will be some instructions at the top and something that is formatted below (there's an example below this paragraph). The part below is for a "template". Templates are special wiki commands that refer to another page (which happens to be the one you are looking at right there) for what to do. In this case, the template creates that nice striped box and makes it easy to upload an image. For the character page, we don't need all that text. We just need the part after the first <pre> untl the </pre>.

Copy that text and paste it into the new page that is being edited for the character. So the new page will look like this:

{{Player Character
|name         = 
|kinship      = 
|world        = 
|vocation     = 
|class        = 
|race         = 
|region       = 
|age          = 
|height       = 
|sex          = 
|skin         = 
|hair         = 
|eye          = 
|image        = -Player Character Page-Player Character Page.jpg
|imagecaption = 
}}

(Yes, you can just copy that if you want... :) I included the page for the template in case it changes later.)

Type something like "initial page creation; player character template added" in the summary box and click on "save page".

Now this page will have one of those striped boxes, but it will be empty.

Click on edit near the top of the page, below where it has the "Article" tab, and you should see that text again. Now, put in the information for your character. The information goes after the equal sign.

Hobo's information is:

{{Player Character
|name         = Johnny
|kinship      = Hobo's Brigade
|world        = Arkensone
|vocation     = Explorer
|class        = Champion
|race         = Man
|region       = Lone Lands
|age          = 28
|height       = 5'11"
|sex          = Male
|skin         = yes
|hair         = yes
|eye          = two
|image        = -Player Character Page-Player Character Page.jpg
|imagecaption = 
}}

Which results in the box to the right -->

Johnny
Tutorial on Player Page Creation
World:	Meneldor
Vocation:	Explorer
Class:	Champion
Race:	Man
Region:	Lone Lands
Age:	28
Height:	5'11"
Sex:	Male
Skin:	yes
Hair:	yes
Eye:	two

After the page is saved, (with something like "Johnny's info" in the summary) a bunch of links will appear at the bottom. That is because the template looks at the information that is in the block and includes the appropriate categories (like the ones at the bottom of this page).

Nifty, eh?

Rinse and repeat for any other character pages you want to create.

Conclusion

That's pretty much it for creating a page for your character. The important things to remember are that Turbine has asked for each character page to be a subset of the user page and, of course, keep to the ToS.

Making the Links Look Nicer

As promised, how to make those links look nicer. User:Hobo/Johnny on the page looks a bit cumbersome. To make it look nicer, change it so it is like this:

[[User:Hobo/Johnny|Johnny]]

The | is the "pipe" character, usually located above the enter key on US keyboards. The pipe tells the lorebook wiki to display the link as "Johnny" but the link itself is still "User:Hobo/Johnny" (it also effects sorting too, but that's another discussion...).

Duplicate Names

What if you have more than one character with the same name? Since the characters will be on different servers, just include the server name in the page names for the characters. This can be done in several different ways.

The following will put the character pages below a server page:

[[User:Hobo/Meneldore/Johnny]]
[[User:Hobo/Arkenstone/Johnny]]

This includes the server name in the character page name:

[[User:Hobo/Meneldore_Johnny]]
[[User:Hobo/Arkenstone_Johnny]]

And this puts the character name first, with the page with the server's name actually having the character information.

[[User:Hobo/Johnny/Meneldore]]
[[User:Hobo/Johnny/Arkenstone]]

Not recommended since the categories the page ends up in will be somewhat confusing (remember, the page will automatically end up in several categories due to the template).

However, something like this should be okay:

[[User:Hobo/Johnny/Johnny_at_Meneldore]]
[[User:Hobo/Johnny/Johnny_at_Arkenstone]]

Using the | can make the links more readable:

[[User:Hobo/Meneldore/Johnny|Johnny at the Meneldore Server]]
[[User:Hobo/Arkenstone/Johnny|Joynny at the Arkenstone Server]]

Which will result in the links looking like

Johnny at the Meneldore Server
Johnny at the Arkenstone Server

Goodbye!

Hope this helps. Comments and suggestions can be left using the "discussion" tab at the top of the page.

--wyrde