Help:Advice for new editors

Welcome to the Path of Exile Wiki! All the content you see here is added and maintained by volunteer editors. We'd love it if you would join us!

First and always, have fun!

If you find yourself getting frustrated, step back. Take a break. Ask for other editors' advice. Or just stop doing whatever's frustrating you and try something different. Remember, the thing that's frustrating you may be some other editor's favorite thing. Do what makes you happy and energized, and let other editors do the rest.

Get started

• Create an account
  • You need to create a free account. This will let you make edits and join in discussions.

• Be bold
  • There's no need to wait. This article will give you advice on what you can do and some good ways of doing it. But when in doubt, jump in and start editing. You can't break anything; there are other editors that can help you fix mistakes and improve. Every editor you interact with, even the ones who seem to know all the answers, were once a new editor just like you.

• Be respectful
  • Remember that all those other editors will have their own opinions about your contributions. And you will have your own opinions of others' contributions. Always stay civil. Don't insult others. Criticize articles when needed, but don't criticize the people who contribute to them. Work things out respectfully in talk pages. Don't get into edit wars. You can always add the {{discuss}} tag to an article to ask other editors for their thoughts.

• Join the conversation
  • See the issues that editors are currently discussing about the wiki as a whole.
  • Join the Discord server for real-time conversation and help.

• Learn the basics of wiki editing
  • The documentation on this wiki tends to assume that you're starting with a basic knowledge of how wiki editing works; it concentrates more on the things that make the Path of Exile wiki different from, say, Wikipedia.
  • If you've never edited a wiki, you'll find it easier to understand things if you start by learning a bit about wiki editing in general. Wikipedia has some great tutorials.
  • In particular, this wiki makes extensive use of templates, which can be recognised by the double-curly-brace {{Template name}} syntax. To view the documentation for a template, visit the page 'Template:template name'. For example the code {{il|Tabula Rasa}} produces a nicely formatted item link: ; this is documented at Template:il.

Start an article

If you feel like jumping in with both feet, pick a topic that doesn't seem to be covered by the wiki, and start an article to cover it! Just fill in this box with the name of the article you want to write. Or, when you use the wiki's search box to search for something, and there's not already an article by that name, just click the link at the top of the search results to start writing that article.

Improve an existing article

If you'd rather start smaller, improving existing articles is a great way to learn about editing while helping the wiki.

Remember: You can make any article better, but you can't make any article perfect. Just like Path of Exile, editing a wiki is a game of diminishing returns. If you pile all your points into one stat, every new point will have less of an impact than the one before. If you pile all your effort into one article, the same thing can happen. You can often help out more by doing a little work on a lot of articles than you can by doing a lot of work on a few. But if a particular article is a labor of love that energizes you, that works too!

Find something to improve

• Pick an article that covers a topic that you're knowledgeable about or interested in. There's bound to be a way to make it better.
• If you're knowledgeable about Path of Exile, try confirming some dubious statements or cleaning up some guesswork. Or dig into an article that needs to be updated to reflect game changes.
• If you like making things more readable and understandable, try fixing some articles with the wrong tone. Or find an article needing cleanup that may need more serious help.
• Check the list of recent changes to see what other editors are currently working on.
• And if you want to start writing a lot of your own content, try picking a stub that you can expand into a full article.

Start with the basics

• Correct spelling and grammar.
• Reword complicated or convoluted text to make it clearer.
• Add links. If an article mentions something that's the subject of another article, add a link so that the reader can quickly see the related article.
• If an article's structure makes it hard to read and understand, or if it looks quite different from other similar pages, fix it. The Manual of Style should always be your guide.

Fix the facts

• If an article makes unsourced factual statements that don't seem like they're common knowledge, look for a source and add it to the article.
  • If you can't find a source, use the {{Citation needed}} tag to request others to have a look.
• If a source seems dodgy or out-of-date, find and add a better one.
  • Or use the {{Better source}} tag to bring in other editors.
• If you know that something about PoE has recently changed in a patch, that's a great time to update the related articles and add new sources.
  • Is there a video in the article? It might be outdated and need to be removed, or better yet, replaced with a newer video on the same topic.
  • Make sure to update the revision table at the bottom of the article to reflect any changes.
    • Note that many specific facts about particular PoE items are imported from the game data itself. If an incorrect fact doesn't seem to be in the article text itself -- if it comes from some complicated query in the article's source -- then the problem probably needs to be fixed by importing new game information rather than by editing the article. You'll probably want to leave changes like that for the experts.

Add new facts

• If an article is missing information about the topic it's discussing, add more.
• If the way a mechanic works is difficult to understand from the article, it may help to add an example. Just don't go overboard with this.
• A video can really help to demonstrate a boss fight or explain a mechanic. Check YouTube and other video sites. But watch the video fully before adding it to the article! And don't forget that videos can become obsolete after changes are made to the game. If the video's title refers to a particular patch level, check the revision table at the bottom of the article to see whether things have changed significantly since then. If the video doesn't mention a patch level, check the date that the video was uploaded, and compare it against the release date of the patches in the article's revision table.
• Be reluctant to manually write lists of game items, especially long and complicated lists. There's often a way to create these lists directly from the game data, so it will stay up-to-date when changes are made. When in doubt, ask other editors.
• If you need to add mathematical facts and examples, adding LaTeX formulas with the {{Math}} tag can make things much easier to read.

Keep going

As long as you have the time and the inclination, there'll always be something more you can do to improve the wiki. Stay bold. Keep trying new things. Remember to ask for help when you need it. And always have fun!