Contributing
The Lolibrary wiki belongs to all of us here in the community, and we welcome whatever expertise you can bring to the table! This page should help get you started with contributing to the wiki; for any other questions, please check our FAQ page or reach out to us on Discord directly.
Getting Started
To begin contributing, you will first need to make sure you have a Lolibrary account. The main site and wiki are linked, so if you are logged into the main page, you will be here as well. If you do not see yourself logged in to the wiki for any reason, please try closing all wiki pages and then logging out and back into your account here.
This wiki is based on the MediaWiki platform. If you are unfamiliar with it or want to brush up on your knowledge, I would suggest taking a peek at this help page. Browsing through existing pages and their source editing pages is a great way to get familiar with how the platform and formatting works, as is playing around/testing things out in a sandbox page such as this.
Adding your Contributions - Guidelines
As with any community, there a few guidelines to consider as you participate. In particular, there are 5 N's we want to touch on before you begin contributing to the wiki:
Neutrality - Try to remain and objective as much as possible towards the topics you are contributing; proper sourcing and neutral tone are always preferable to "I" statements and personal opinions/experiences when contributing to articles. "Mr.Yan is sleazy" is a non-neutral statement, but "Mr.Yan has been at the center of accusations of mistreatment and misconduct", when cited properly, would be appropriately neutral. In short: Leave your opinions at the door, but if you do need to bring them, bring those receipts and observe proper citation practices.
Notability - As with any wiki, before creating a new page check not only whether the page has already been created, but also whether it is noteworthy enough to require its own page. Topics that do not meet this requirement may still be mentioned and included in broader topic pages, but may not warrant a separate one. To be sufficiently notable, topics should be relevant to Lolibrary and/or EGL history, and have enough verifiable, cite-able information to fill a few paragraphs. For brands and indie brands, there should be either an existing Lolibrary tag/brand, a dozen or more items listed in the database, or a direct influence on notable lolita brands/history for a brand to get it's own page. Smaller brands are documented on the Indie Brand Directory page.
Note Those Sources - While some things may be common knowledge, whenever possible please cite a source for information. This is particularly important for things like information about people or companies. Please do not cite aggregate sources like other wikis that are unsourced, as these sources are hard to verify. If you want to use information from a sourced wiki, like wikipedia Japan, it's best to get their source from the sources area, and work from the original source they used.
Nastiness - Don't be. That's it, just please don't be weird or petty.
Neat - Formatting is important. If your contribution sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of the page(s), maybe it's time to brush up on some MediaWiki how-tos, or to ask for some help! For new pages, we've provided some handy template buttons to help create a blank preformatted page with all the sections and features you may need. Just enter in the desired page title to get started:
Topics & Categories
Lolibrary Wiki entries are at present broken down into the following category structure:
Not sure where to start? Many existing pages are in need of additional detail; try browsing the pages for brands or topics you have expertise/info on, or running a search for pages with incomplete disclaimers to add to! Additionally, you can check the Wanted Pages list to see important topics that have been mentioned but do not yet have full pages.
Important note: Before making a new page for any topic, please ensure you double-check to make sure that there is not an existing entry for the topic already! Misspellings or differing capitalizations may often result in unintentional duplicate pages or broken links.
Page Creation
You can use the boxes below to create a new entry for one of the following categories with the appropriate template pre-loaded and ready to fill!
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