Ponderosa’s Guide to a Wiki Style Factbook

How often have you come across a bloggy factbook, consisting of multiple articles with only a few sentences each? A wiki-style factbook allows you to condense a lot of information in only one factbook, and looks much more professional.

Wiki style factbooks are inspired from Wikipedia articles and other wikias. In this guide, I will show you how to create an article that is highly informative, organized, and visually appealing.

Disclaimer: This guide is designed for the gameside factbooks, found on your nation page. Some codes and templates do not work well on forumside factbooks, and will not work at all on sites like IIWiki. If you have any questions, please submit them in the thread here. I prefer not to receive telegrams with questions.

Contents
Sidebar
Title and Introduction
Table of Contents
Body
Largest Cities Table
Images
Template Source Code

Sidebar
This is a major part of a wiki factbook. It provides quick facts and statistics about your nation.
What to Include
- Nation name and pretitle
- Flag
- Motto
- Anthem Title
- Small map or orthographic showing where your nation is located (no details!)
- Capital and Largest City
- Demonym
- Government (e.g., national leader, legislature, etc)
- Geographic Statistics (land area, water percentage, etc)
- GDP
- And more. See my factbook or Wikipedia entries to draw inspiration.

How to make it
The sidebar will be the very first thing in your factbook code. It will involve the use of

Title and Introduction
The title of your factbook is automatically set across the top of the page. There is no way to remove it. If you’d like a second, more colorful title, feel free to add it.

Your introduction section is basically a summary of your nation. The first paragraph is typically a description of where your nation is located, which nations border it, and a list of territories. The second paragraph (often merged with the first) is a brief description of your nation’s geography, usually including land area and population.

The next few paragraphs are often a summary of your nation’s history. If you’re like me and can’t be bothered to write a very detailed history of your nation, leave it all for the body.

The final paragraph of your introduction describes your nation’s position in the present day. It is essentially a ego-rub that brags about your nation’s economic status, positions of world power, and freedoms. If you’d like, you could otherwise use this space to talk about how dirt-poor your nation is. It doesn't matter. Nobody’s going to read it anyway.

Remember, leave details to the body paragraphs!

Table of Contents
If you want a bit of a challenge, you can add a table of contents to your factbook. This typically comes after your introduction. This involves the use of [anchor] and [url] tags.

1) Write your Table of Contents without any BB code. Just a list format.
2) Put

6) Go to each section of your factbook and add [anchor] tags to each section’s title. [anchor=] will allow you to link each section to the table of contents. For example, to link to the table of contents above, use the code below.

CODE: SELECT ALL
Etymology
History
Geography

Body
This is going to be the meat of your factbook, where all the tiny details you excluded above will now be recorded. If you have even more in-depth articles, you can add an indented link to your “main article” like so:

CODE: SELECT ALL

Main Article: Religion and Religious Policy in Ponderosa

Becomes:

Main Article: Religion and Religious Policy in Ponderosa

The body can really have whatever you want in it. Some popular sections include, in order:

Etymology - This is the origin of your country's name! This section will probably be one of your shortest. Don't forget to add your demonym at the bottom.

History - This will be one of your longest sections. No story is complete unless you start here, but a good place to start might be with the prehistoric tribes in your country's geographic area. Maybe your country exists in a real world place (Ponderosa, for example, is an alternative to what is really the Southwestern US) in which case your history may be largely drawn from real-world history. Or, you might get even more creative, inventing a country in the far future or even in another world entirely! It's all up to you, but no factbook is complete without the History section. Go all out here!

Geography This is a mid-sized section, but it should be pretty easy - especially if your country is located on Earth. Start out with some basic facts about land and water area, which part of the world your country is located, and a short list of its overseas territories and whatnot. Then, go into more depth about all the various regions (the west is dominated by Mediterranean coastline, the north is mostly desert, etc). If you want, include some pictures - a satellite image, perhaps, or photos of various plants and animals. Did I mention that? Climate and wildlife information are good sub-sections for this section.

Demographics - All about people. Begin with some information about population size and estimated growth rates, including immigration effects. Then, add short paragraphs about the composition of your population: race, religion, language, sexual orientation, etc. If you have information about population density and largest cities, it should also go here. Be sure to check the largest cities section of this guide!

Government - A description of your government system. This includes what it is ("The Federation of Trapjackistan is a theocratic dictatorship...") followed by sections on your political divisons, election system, foreign relations, and taxation.

Military - This is often a subsection of your government section. This is often where factbook writers make a huge mistake - they forget that the military section should be a brief overview. Nothing is more annoying then getting a telegram asking me to look at a factbook, only to find that my template has been used as little more than dressing around a main course of enormous photos of military hardware. If you must include a picture, limit yourself to one. Also include information about military size, major divisions (like Air Force or Army, not detailed information about the Twelfth Stormtrooper Platoon ffs), and budget.

Economy - A mid-sized section about your economy. Some questions that should be answered: What economic system does your country use? What's your GDP, and how fast is it growing? Is your country rich or poor? How big is the private sector compared to the public sector? What products do you export, and who do you trade with? Income, poverty, and homelessness are also good sections to have here.

There's lots more you can include. Sections on education, infrastructure, health, science and technology, and culture are good additions to have here. Just have fun with it, and don't feel obligated to write about how the roads are built if you don't want to.

Largest Cities
I have recieved a lot of personal messages about my lovely little city chart, showing off my top ten cities. This was a relatively recent addition to my factbook, and was thus absent from the guide. I will attempt to resolve that problem now.
This part of the factbook usually belongs as a subcategory of your Demographics section. If you don't have one of those, make one. Then, make a table. Start with a

Images
I've received several questions on how to post images in your factbook, and I will attempt to answer them. You will need to upload your images to an image-sharing site, such as Photobucket, Tinypic, or Imgur. For the purposes of this guide, I will demonstrate how to use Imgur to upload images.

1) Go to .
2) Under the "Upload images" header, you will see a link that says "Computer." Click on that.
3) A window will open, allowing you to search for and select your file from your computer. Select your file, and click "Open."
4) After uploading the image, you will arrive at a new page on which your image is in the center. If you like the image, copy the code under the heading "BBCode (message boards & forums)."
5) Paste the code into your factbook.

Now you have your image! However, you may not like the size. Luckily, back on step 4, there is a link in the upper-right that says "Edit image." After clicking that, you can resize your image using the box in the upper-right. Make sure the proportions are locked! Once you've set the image to the preferred size, click "Apply", then "Save."

By the way, the answer to any image question I get (how to make maps, orthographics, flags, whatever) is always just Microsoft Paint. Edit existing images, or make one from scratch. I don't have any special tricks for design, which is why all my designs are very minimalist.

Template Source Code
As part of this guide, I have included the source code for a wiki factbook template. If you don’t understand this guide, or just don’t want to read it, you can simply copy/paste this template and fill in the information.
CODE: SELECT ALL

Etymology

DESCRIBE ORIGIN OF NATION NAME

The standard way to refer to a citizen of NATION is as a "DEMONYM."

History

DESCRIBE HISTORY

Geography

DESCRIBE GEOGRAPHY

DESCRIBE CLIMATE

DESCRIBE ENVIRONMENT

INSERT MAP

Demographics

Population
DESCRIBE POPULATION

Language
DESCRIBE LANGUAGE

Religion

DESCRIBE RELIGION

Race
DESCRIBE RACE

Largest Cities

Government

DESCRIBE GOVERNMENT

Foreign Relations and Military

DESCRIBE DIPLOMACY

DESCRIBE MILITARY

Economy

DESCRIBE ECONOMY

Culture

DESCRIBE CULTURE

Infrastructure

DESCRIBE INFRASTRUCTURE

Energy
DESCRIBE ENERGY

Template by The Free Republic of Ponderosa
Template may be found here.
Last edited by Ponderosa on Wed Apr 12, 2017 11:02 pm, edited 24 times in total.