WIP
Writing a page can often be a daunting task, but that's what this guide is here to help with. This is a simple step by step guide on how to write a decent page, as page quality has been an issue as of late.
The first thing that one should have in order to write a page is an idea. Inspiration is incredibly important to create a novel page, as without it pages simply become everyday structures with 1 gimmick at best.
In order to find inspiration, you'll want to look at any similar fictional writing system (The Wikidot, Liminal Archives, SCP, or just here), and pick out specific ideas that you like (NEVER plagiarize work. Reusing ideas if you put a unique spin on them is fine, but a ctrl c + v is not.). Write them all down, these are for your brainstorm session. Then, come up with a setting. Since the Backrooms are a surreal space, this is not hard to do. Just think of the following questions:
What is the theme of your page?
How will wanderers survive in your level or escape your entity? (Pages that are difficult to survive are good, but pages that are simply death upon entry should be used extremely sparingly, and for a purpose)
What, logically, else exists in your level? (Having smilers in a level themed after light, for example, makes no sense.
How will someone get in or our of your level?
How does your entity survive?
What sets your page apart from the rest?
Write your answers down along with your ideas. If you're having trouble answering the questions, it's fairly easy to just spam "Random Page", write down random aspects of every page you come across until you have a good range of options, and madlib them in as you see fit. Now, it's time to bring everything together.
Now that you have a basic mental image of your page, it's time to bring everything together. Organize your ideas into 3 categories: Gimmick, Feature, or Unrelated. Gimmicks are the ideas you like the best, that make up the main identity of your page. Gimmicks should be either common enough that they are a cliché and then built upon, or be entirely distinct. Features are secondary ideas that you would like to include, usually as details or smaller aspects of your main thing. Unrelated ideas are ideas you thought were good at the time, but thematically don't fit.
Now, it's time to make the ideas you've categorized distinct. For this example, let's say that I really liked SCP-096, and thought that it was well written. First of all, I'd think about what makes 096 good. After thinking for a while, I'd say that it's the slow sense of impending doom / uncertainty that keeps you on your toes (Nobody knows what 096 looks like, you can hear screaming like an hour before your death), and the obliviousness / difficulty to avoid ("4 fucking pixels"). Now, we can reincorporate these ideas into a new form. There are many directions you could go from here, but I personally thought that having like a lair for the thing be cool. For the impending doom / difficulty to avoid thing, maybe stepping foot inside the lair curses you, so that you're now being followed our you have a tracker or something. What does sensing things that step into lairs remind me of? Spiders. So now we have a spider which can hunt you down after you step in it's lair. However, what if it was actually the lair itself that followed you? Now I've thrown in a twist.
However, a gigantic spider just chasing you isn't exactly hard to stop, even if it's lair also follows you so let's tack on some attributes. What's more terrifying than a spider that follows you? A spider that you can't see that can actually noclip through walls. Finally, let the lair appear anywhere so that there are no safezones. We have now created a similar threat. Finally, let's give it a limit to how long it can stay invisible so that people can spot it out of the corner of their eye for that factor that the scream used to fill.
Our final product that we got from SCP-096: A cave which can open up in any solid surface in any level. There can only be one cave at a time. Whoever steps foot inside of this cave will be hunted by a gigantic spider, resembling a tarantula. The tarantula is capable of invisibility, jumping straight through solid objects and the void, and regenerates extremely quickly. The tarantula can maintain invisibility for 20 minutes. The tarantula never switches or breaks targets, and never sleeps. Once it catches up to a target, it eats them alive. The spider is capable of teleportation to the lair, which appears every 30 minutes 20 feet away from the target.
Not the best written thing in the world, but it works. All of the shortcomings we can flesh out in the remaining steps.
Repeat this process for every idea you have, and make sure there are no obvious parallels.
Now, it's finally time to start writing. You have a few major sections to your page that should be kept separate even before you begin formatting. First of all, though, it should be noted that pages on this wiki are written from the perspective of an organization. Keep the formatting as "Official" and formal as possible. The one exception is breaking formality for the sake of emphasis. Think in the mind of whatever organization wrote the page rather than your own perspective.
First, you have your description.
In this section, you first define your level, if it is a level. This is usually just a restatement of the level name, followed by your various difficulty classes. After your initial definition, give a physical description of all sections of your page, separated by headings. This is your establisher, so put a lot of effort into it. Next, you'll want to establish other aspects of the page. You don't need to go into detail, but summarize your gimmicks and a few of your features in the description section.
Now, it's time to categorize. Go down, create a header for each category, and then create a subheader for each feature followed by a description. Keep the descriptions as detailed and fleshed out as possible, so that you have more things to work with later. The formatting step makes things seem MUCH shorter than they are, and often times the more detailed a page is the more effect you can get from leaving something vague. Not everything has to be detailed, and you can remove details for the sake of mystery, but in order for those exceptions to be effective there has to be enough detail in the other sections to make it noticeably different.
Once you have a basic draft with headers and subheaders including all of your features and gimmicks,it's time to build on them.
Read over your page and think to yourself "What would a reader think about or ask?" for every section. You can continue to purposely leave things ambiguous, but on questions that can be answered without detracting quality answer in as much detail as possible. In addition, throw in text to help with either visualisation, or text that is often associated with quality (Decent dialogue, for the most part). Then, flesh out your page as much as you can thematically. You should have around 20,000 words by the end of this step, neatly organized for you to go back to. Really, this part is just the menial part of pagebuilging, and there is nothing that will help you very much other than just writing until you run out of ideas for expansion.
Now, it's time to read over your thing. Slap your WIP of a level into Writing Critique (Or wait until formatting is done), get it peer-reviewed and scan over it yourself to search for grammatical mistakes or unintentional breaks in the theme. Come up with a justification for why every feature of your level in it's current state should be added to the page. If there's anything that you can't justify, either revise it to where you can justify it or cut it entirely. Finally, get some people who aren't at all involved with the Backrooms to make sure your page doesn't just completely fall apart without context. If suspension of disbelief can hold up without the setting around it already suspending disbelief, it's probably pretty good.
Once you have ensured that the content of the page is decent, it's time to start working on polishing.
Some people choose to do this step first, but in this guide it is sixth, so that you don't need to also have a format in mind before you brainstorm. The Wikitext Guide on the homepage has all of the information you need for applying the actual formatting itself, so this is simply a guide for when to apply it.
First of all, if your page is under 10,000 words, formatting might actually not be worth it. A meaty - looking page with section formatting will work just fine to simplify things, and will look a lot less pathetic than single-paragraph tabbers.
First of all, the bread and butter of wiki design: The tabbers. Make your major categories tabbers, and under each tabber keep your headers. If each category has too many features/subcategories to be organized, you can create nested tabbers (This is not explained in the wikitext guide, it's <tabber> |-| Example1= {{#tag:tabber | TITLE = TEXT {{!}}-{{!}} TITLE = TEXT {{!}}-{{!}} }} |-| Example2= Example text </tabber>
for an end result of:
You want 2-6 paragraphs per tab, if you have too little cut down on the tabs. if you have too much and it makes sense, nest another tabber
Alternatively, you can use collapsible text. Collapsible text, or divs, should be used sparingly. They are best used to create a list of logs that can be viewed, condense text even more than tabbers, space out reading for dramatic effect, hide secrets inside of a page, but for general formatting they are often overshadowed by tabbers. An extremely long page (120k characters or more) could benefit from a tabber system combined with a table of contents / div system leading to each individual feature, however it would be difficult to implement.
Throwing up an intro paragraph and NOTICE template can make your page look nice, and some images will start to spice things up as well. Finally, once you have a solid 95% of your text in formatting, look for text that is "Different", whether it be apparently from a third party outside of the wiki, a notice, or dialogue, change fonts as you wish. Finally, symbols such as > and paragraphs can break up walls of text. More complex CSS should be used, if possible, a lot of the time.
If your gimmick involves the page itself, various JS and Wikitext can be used to make the gimmick more dynamic.
Make sure your formatting works, proofread and peer-review one more time, and continue with the expanding process until you know you're entirely done. Check for grammar issues, messy wording, and a sense of completion. Make sure none of your ideas are just simply ripped from somewhere, and you should be about good to go.