Help:Common editing mistakes

This is a quick reference on common editing mistakes on the Doom Wiki and how to avoid them. See also our Policies and guidelines page for a more full set of style rules.

Categories

Categorization of articles and files is important, but is easy to forget or to do improperly. Keep the following tips in mind:

• Remember to put every article you create in at least one category. You can browse categories starting from Categories, or use Special:CategoryTree.
• Files should be categorized by both license and by content. The former is usually added automatically when you select a license template for the image, but the latter must almost always be added manually (a few exceptions exist; ie., for cover art, physical software media, and book covers).
• Categories not added by a template should be at the very bottom of an article, and should be kept in alphabetic order.
• Articles about people or articles that start with a word such as "A", "An", or "The" need a "DEFAULTSORT" key (see help on article metadata).

Grammar and spelling

Since this is an encyclopedic work, we do require standard, proper English grammar and spelling. You may contribute here without having perfect English writing skills, but understand that your edits will continue to be overwritten with a large number of fixes almost immediately. Please do not take it personally, and instead try to review the edits made to your text and learn from them to better your skills, as this will help you learn better English usage and style in general.

Images

• Images must either be freely licensed or have a specific fair use justification. Otherwise, we will delete them. We are not a generic image archive.
• Use images sparingly; do not fill the entire right-hand column of an article with pictures (consider using a gallery when there are a legitimate large number of pictures, such as screenshots of a map).
• Do not forget to provide a good caption for your image, even if it partially repeats part of the article text.

Links

• Wikilinks can be made into standard plurals or have other endings added to them without repeating the link text twice. Rather than "[[cacodemon|cacodemons]]", you can simply type "[[cacodemon]]s".
• Wikilinks rarely need to have underscores specified; spaces will be translated into them automatically. For example, when using the {{wp}} template to link to Wikipedia, do not copy and paste the article's name from a URL, as you would end up with text such as {{wp|Killer_Tomatoes}}. By using "Killer Tomatoes" instead, you are not required to specify the article name a second time as the link text.
• External links should not be used inline as references or examples. Use our Extension:Cite capabilities via the ref and references tags instead.