If you'd like to create a page for a creator or a work, rest assured; There Is no Such Thing as Notability and Work Pages Are a Free Launch. If you want to make a page for an unreleased work, see Creating a Work Page for an Upcoming Work. Here's a step-by-step guide for building a page with the correct markup.
Note before you do anything: We do not allow placeholder/work-in-progress pages. The page should have the minimum description and tropes as detailed below in the guide and should not have styling violations or formatting errors from the moment it's published. If you're not confident you can start a page with those requirements, please use either a Sandbox page with the work title (Sandbox/TitleGoesHere - replace TitleGoesHere with the work title), your troper sandbox (Sandbox/YourUsername - replace YourUsername with your username), or an external notepad. You may then publish the page when the draft is ready.
Step-by-step guide
- Find the blank page to edit
The first step is to find the page where your work is going to go. You can do this by changing the URL of an existing wikipage (e.g. open https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NamespaceGoesHere/TitleGoesHere
, change "TitleGoesHere" to the name of the work/creator, and "NamespaceGoesHere" to the medium of the work. Alternatively, you can find/create a Red Link (in the form of NamespaceGoesHere/TitleGoesHere) on the Wiki Sandbox (or anywhere else) and click on it.
We're gonna reiterate this one because people get it wrong startlingly often — you're not going to the literal page "NamespaceGoesHere/TitleGoesHere". You're replacing "NamespaceGoesHere" with the namespace your work belongs in (e.g. "Film" or "VideoGame" or "WesternAnimation"), and "TitleGoesHere" with the CamelCased title of your work (e.g. "ThreeThousandWaysToExplode" or "WhyImNotEatingBreakfastAnymore" or "ScrungussAdventuresInHell"). The result should very clearly be referring to your work and not any other work. Got it? Okay, good.
Note that we require usage of the official name of the work, not Fan Nicknames. Some works/creators share the same name, making some form of disambiguation necessary. Consult this project thread or Ask The Tropers if you're uncertain how to disambiguate between existing titles. In addition, our titles have a 64-character limit. Pages with titles longer than this have saving and indexing problems. If your title is longer than 64 characters, you will need to shorten it in some way: use an Officially Shortened Title, leave out a subtitle, or find somewhere reasonable to cut it off if neither of those is possible. Feel free to discuss with other tropers if you would like input.
Every word in the title should start with a capital letter, even those not capitalized in the actual title. All caps should only be used in the case of acronyms and initialisms. If a name uses CamelCase, such as "McDonald", the title should follow the same capitalization.
If the title starts with a non-letter, such as a numeral, it will need to be spelled out in words. Numerals that do not appear at the start of a title should be written using the numeral itself. In general, you should get as close to the title as you can using alphanumeric characters.
Remember to use the correct namespace for the article. For reference, the list of officially supported namespaces can be found here. - Add a Description
Now that you're on the right article and you've clicked [Edit Page], write up a short description of the work/creator. A work name should have italics for longer works, or "quotes" for shorter works like songs, essays, or individual chapters/episodes of a larger work. Do not use bold or underlining. No special formatting is to be used for creator names, personas, sacred texts, or a series of works collectively referred to by a non-Franchise name.
Good things to include: the name of the work's creator(s), the year it was first published, the genre and medium(s), a brief and spoiler-free overview of the plot, and a link to the official website.
Things not to include: value judgments (don't say how much they sucked/how awesome it was), critical reception (that's just a specific variant of value judgments), recommendations (don't tell us whether or not we should check it out), and plot spoilers. And whatever you do, do not copy text from the Wikipedia page, another wiki, or any other site. That is Plagiarism and copyright infringement and it is bad.
At the bottom of the intro, type ---- (four hyphens) to create a horizontal line. - (Optional work index)
For a creator page or a franchise page, include an overview of related works as a simple bulleted list after the description. Type a header that says "!! Works in the [Work Name] series:" for single-medium franchises. (The !! at the beginning of the line is the Header markup.)
A related work for a creator page would be anything they've been involved in the creation of, as a writer, actor, editor, or anything else that gets your name on the cover. A related work for a franchise page would be any work that the primary creator includes in that franchise. If one or more of the works does not yet have a wiki page associated with it, please list them as redlinks to make things easier in case the page gets created in the future.
For works where this creator is not one of the primary creators, such as an actor instead of a director, the work should be excluded from the index tags. See How Indexing Works for more information on index tags.
At the bottom of the overview, type ---- (four hyphens) to create a horizontal line. - Add a list of tropes
Underneath the line, create a header that says "!! [Work Name] contains examples of:". Underneath that, you're going to make the trope list.
The trope examples should be in a bulleted list, alphabetically, with one trope name per line, followed by a colon (:) and a brief explanation of how the trope applies. Check the Text-Formatting Rules if you need help with the wiki markup, and How to Write an Example for miscellaneous tips on style.
There should be a minimum of three tropes with full context listed (if you're stuck, mentioning e.g. who The Hero and the Big Bad are will give you two tropes right off the bat), or the page is at risk of being sent to the Cut List as a stub. More is preferable, of course, so go through the How to Collect Tropes checklist and write down as many as you can! Creators do not have a minimum trope requirement, but see Creator Page Guidelines before adding examples.
Finish off the trope list with another horizontal line: ----. - Check your work
Now click "Preview" to see if there are any unintentional Wiki Words, misspellings, or grammar mistakes. You can publish the page by clicking "Save". - Set the page type
This step is nice and quick. Go to the "Page Info" box on the right side of the screen. Click on the edit button next to "Page Type", then set the page type to "creator" if you've made a page for an actor, director, scriptwriter, etc, or set it to "work" if you've made a page for a franchise, videogame, or musician.
This will enable things like Reviews and the subpage tabs at the top. - Adding indexes
Find an index where the work or creator belongs. Something like Fantasy Webcomics, Films of the 1990s, Strategy Game, Theatrical Productions, etc. Find the correct alphabetical location and add in the article. You should have at least one index, but it likely fits in multiple places, so please add a link in every appropriate location. How Indexing Works covers this topic in more detail. - (Optional custom title submission)
This is only necessary if the title includes punctuation or special characters; otherwise, skip this step. Under the "More" dropdown of the page header, find the "WikiWord" link and click it. Fill out the form to add punctuation, correct capitalization, and so on. Once a moderator approves it, it'll automatically be applied. More detailed instructions for this step can be found at How to Make a Custom Title. - Cross Wick
If you want people to know that your page exists, you'll have to link to it around the Wiki. Remember that trope list you wrote up earlier? Take some time to visit the pages for the tropes you listed and do some Entry Pimping, adding your work as an example on the trope pages. This'll help attract Wiki Magic to make the article grow! - (Optional image uploading)
You can use the upload form under the "More" dropdown of the article header to add an image. Box art or official promotional art (such as a theatrical release poster for a film) is the standard for most media. See How to Pick a Good Image for more info. If you're not sure, you can just skip the image; it looks nice, but it's not required.
And that's it! You're all set. Feel free to click the "add watch" button at the top of the page if you'd like to track changes through your Watchlist.
Need help?
If you have any questions about this process, don't be shy! Create a query in Ask The Tropers and you should get a response pretty quickly. You can also use this thread in the Wiki Talk subforum or this page's discussion section.
If you need help writing up a description or coming up with applicable tropes to list, you'll want to find other fans. Try posting in the appropriate Media section in the TV Tropes Forum or add your proposed works page to the Trope Launch Pad (TLP) to get help and advice from the tropers in those places.
Frequently asked questions
- Is [Work] notable enough to get a page?
There Is no Such Thing as Notability. If it exists, it can be troped. Heck, sometimes we even trope things that don't exist, Just for Fun (but that's for the professionals, so don't try it at home). The exception is porn — this is a Family Friendly wiki, so please no pornographic works. - Can I make a page for a work that I created?
Yeah, sure, go ahead. You're allowed to trope your own works. Just make sure you understand that once the page is out there, you won't have any control or ownership over it — anyone is allowed to edit it, and any editor will have the same rights and privileges as you. This is why it's a bad idea to make Word of God statements for your own work on its wiki page. You are also not allowed to create or add items to a YMMV subpage or related subpages, and you may not review your own work or add recommendations for your own work, though you may add examples marked as Trivia that contain information that's already available to the general public; however, adding Trivia that wasn't already available to the public, such as Word of God statements that haven't appeared anywhere else, is forbidden. - What if it's not published yet?
If your work isn't published yet, you can still make a page for it, but it will have to be in the DarthWiki/ namespace, and it can only be indexed on Unpublished Works. It cannot have subpages, either, like YMMV or Trivia. - What if it's an upcoming work that hasn't been released in full yet?
This is allowed, but we have a whole policy for that because it tends to attract Speculative Troping and Natter. In addition, information from Content Leaks is not allowed for unreleased works. See Creating a Work Page for an Upcoming Work. - I'm not sure which namespace to use.
Pop over to this thread in the TV Tropes Forum and ask. Someone should be able to help you out. - What emphasis do I use for the title?:
Whatever you do, it does not belong in boldface-font (even though The Other Wiki does that). Most works are in italic fonts, made by typing ''italic fonts''. Shorter works have "quote marks" around them, and a select group have no emphasis added at all. There's also no good excuse for making it a link on its own page. - What if it's a foreign work with a non-English title?
TV Tropes is an English-language wiki, so we prefer to use the English titles where applicable. So if the work has an official localized title, use the English title for the page and add the non-English title as a redirect. However, if the work doesn't have an officially-translated English title, you can use the non-English title for the main page and make the English translation into a redirect instead.
Note: The wiki software doesn't support Unicode (at present). Some foreign-language titles may just not work with our system. Get as close as you can but don't sweat it. Whatever you do, do not try to create a wiki URL using anything other than the basic English alphabet (a-z, A-Z) and numerals (0-9), and article titles must begin with a letter. No diacritics or multi-byte characters. It won't work, and if it does work, it'll mess up everything else. - Would somebody please make an article for [Work]?
Nope. We aren't here to do your job for you. If a work is popular enough, someone else may be along to create an article for it, but we can't force that process. You're the fan, the person who's familiar with the story and its tropes, so why aren't you writing the article? Don't be shy; we're patient with people as long as they ask for help.
