This is a guideline for our Lore staff.
First of all, welcome to the Wiki and I hope you will have fun editing the contents. This guide is for the english wiki only and may differ when it comes to other language wikis. Please refer to the guide of the wiki you want to edit!
The three wikis (english, german, french) originally were seperate projects, originating between 2004 and 2009. It was in early 2010 when we merged the wikis to form this "wiki-farm" we have today. So the different communities were building their own seperate structures and they differ a lot sometimes. We are trying to resolve those differences to have a shared document structure amongst the wikis but it takes time and much effort to do so. And as you may have noticed, there is still much to do.
What's important is to recognize, that the wikis do not often follow the same structure. So the same information might have one distinct place on one wiki, while another wiki splits that information and presents it on several pages.
There is no real guideline on where to put new content, but you'll have to find out yourself. I'm sorry, but a wiki is not working the way a forum post is (write, translate, post).
To answer that question there are a two things to consider:
I will be giving guides on where to start editing, according to what content to what you want below and also outline the basic structure of this wiki. Feel free to contact me on either IRC/Slack (SirCotare) or eMail (sircotare@ryzom.com).
Breaking down topics into smaller parts is often a good idea, but can be very well exagerated. For example, you might be tempted to split a timeline into pieces based on the year of events, creating a new wiki page for each year. Consider the following: does it make sense? What will the content of each page be? One or two lines? In that case it would make more sense to create one page and use headlines to represent each year instead.
When you create new pages, consider that the user will eventually have to find them. Users will not simply type in something in the search field and hopefully find your page (they won't, trust me). You will have to guide the user to actually find your content. So when a new page is born, you will have to think about liking to it from somewhere. Where are the related topics? Don't hesitate to add your new page to one or more "see also" sections of other topics! Don't be shy!
Every page, except for the mainpage and some major "portal" articles will fit into a category. Categories collect articles that share a general topic. A page might even have more than one category since it might cover several topics. Here is an example: The page "Verdant Heights" is categorized as: Category:Verdant Heights, Category:Continents, Category:New Lands, Category:Surface regions
So, now you have created a new page and filled it with content. You might think you are done and you would be right if this was not a "damn" wiki. Your text might be mentioning several keywords like "Matis", "Silan", "Goo" or any other topic that can be of interest. Try to change some of these to be wiki-links to the corresponding pages so the reader may refer to them via links. That's one of the key ideas of a wiki - Cross referencing. Of course you don't have to link every occurrance of every keyword. I myself tend to link the first occurrance of a keyword and repeat the link after 2-3 screen sizes of scrolling down.
All events have their own "Namespace" called "Events". That means, the name of an event page looks like this: "Event:Title of the Event". The category Category:Events will show you what I mean. Now, every event will of course have to at least be categorized as part of the category Events.
Events have a link from the Main Page and are listed on the page Ryzom_Wiki:Current_events, so please add them there.
If you are just adding lore stories linke we had on the old wiki (atys.ryzom.com), you can do so by creating your new page and adding a link to it to the The_Chronicles_of_Atys page. Don't forget to categorize :)
When adding lore to the wiki, it may affect topics that are already covered. This may be caused by an event or a new story or such. I'll explain with a simple (fictionary) example: The great leader of thy Fyros, Hans, is gathering players to accompany him to a kitin stronghold he wants to eradicate. After a glorious fight the kitin are defeated but his majesty Hans was slain. Now his son Peter has the grave duty to bury his father and rule the Fyros from now on. This might well be a great event which can be documented in the "Events" section. But it also affects the pages of "Hans", "Peter" and the pages related to Fyros history like the Fyros page itself. I know, that there is much work involved when considering all this, but we will have to edit all the related information too to keep things consistant.