User talk:Madminecrafter12

About editing templates
I've taken the liberty of creating a basic talk page for you so that we can dialog to answer your question on the Talk:Tutorials page. (Article talk pages should only be used to discuss the article itself.) Be sure to add this page to your watchlist by clicking on the star tab at the top of the page, so you'll get a notification whenever somebody updates it. User talk pages are the best place to have a dialog with another editor when the discussion wouldn't interest other editors. The convention is for the initiator to create a new topic on the other editor's talk page, and the entire dialog occurs there rather than splitting the messages between their two talk pages. I will have this page on my watchlist, so when you update it I'll be notified automatically and can reply here.

By the way, you got your signature set up correctly, but you're still signing with ~ and then adding your username. You don't need to add that; it's part of the generated signature. Look back at the Talk:Tutorials page, at the end of your entry, and you'll see what I mean.

So here's the scoop: Like almost anything else on the wiki, you don't need special permissions to edit most templates. However, it's important to understand that because templates are invoked from many article pages, a mistake in a template can have a wide-ranging effect on the wiki, so it's wise to be extra cautious when editing them.

First, I suggest you be comfortable with the concept of wiki namespaces. Namespaces are a wiki mechanic, so the place to look for information about them is the MediaWiki help system. (MediaWiki is the software that runs wikis everywhere.) The help page for namespaces is here. After that, it would be good to look at the help page for templates too, but don't worry about understanding all of that one just now since you'll only be adding links to the Tutorials template, not changing how it works.

Once you have the background, you can go ahead and edit the Template:Tutorials page to add your links. You can just copy and paste an existing link before or after where you want it to appear, then change the page name. Important: There's a difference in how templates are presented when you're viewing and editing them. When you're viewing them (like you would an article), what you see should be documentation on how the template is used, but when you hit the Edit button you'll see the actual content of the template instead. The content is what gets included in the pages that call the template, using the Tutorials syntax, so that's all you're really interested in right now.

Don't worry too much about making a mistake in this template, because even if you really mess it up you'll only affect tutorials pages and you can quickly undo your changes. (I'm assuming you know how to use the History tab to do that.) But if you're uneasy about it, it's possible to test template changes in a sandbox under your user page, where nothing else will be affected. I wouldn't bother with that until you want to change the logic of a template, as opposed to merely the content it includes. (Most editors never get to the stage of changing template logic, in fact.)

If you have any questions, just ask here. Later, after we've concluded this dialog, you can ask me on my talk page instead. Good luck! – Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 04:15, 13 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the advice! I was able to add the new tutorial pages to the template with ease, and I can now keep the tutorial template up to date. (also, is my signature correct?)- Madminecrafter12 (talk) 14:46, 13 December 2017 (UTC)