Help:Main page

The Main Page on any wiki is the page that can be accessed by clicking the wiki's logo. Depending on the default language of the wiki, this will be at various titles. For example, it will be titled "Accueil" on French wikis or "Hauptseite" on German ones.

I don't know what to put on my main page!
You can create an instant main page by copying the starter kit main page to your wiki's home page. Note that this is already in place on newly created wikis. This will give you a basic page that you can then customize and style as you choose.

First impressions count. This is the page almost everyone will see when they first arrive at your wiki, and is therefore extremely important. If you have nothing on the main page, people will think you have no articles and won't go looking. Some tips:


 * Write a short intro paragraph - tell people what the wiki is about, and what kind of pages it has!
 * Link to your most important articles - help people find their way off the main page and into your hard work
 * Give it a clean design - it doesn't need to be fancy. Make sure the code is correct!

Can I call my main page something else?
Yes, you can - in fact, we recommend it! For new wikis, Wikia automatically moves the main page to a title like: http://WIKINAME.wikia.com/wiki/SITENAME_Wiki

For older wikis, changing the name from "Main Page" has a lot of benefits. The new title of the main page is your choice, but your site will rank much higher in search engines if you move it a name such as "Keyword Wiki", where Keyword is the most likely search term for your wiki's topic.

What if I don't want visitors to edit my main page?
In Wikia's experience, the main page should remain editable, and protection of this page is generally considered harmful. Being the main page is not, in itself, a reason for protection, so try not to make the common mistake of locking this page unnecessarily.

Unless you're receiving millions of visitors a day, like Wikipedia does, protection will probably do your wiki more harm than good. The main page will often be the first page a new user sees, and they may feel that they are not welcome to edit, or they may not even realize the site is editable, and leave the site without contributing.

If you suffer a lot of vandalism on your main page, the first step is to put the page on your watchlist, and perhaps enable email notification so you can clean up unwanted edits promptly. The revert, block, ignore strategy will usually end such vandalism quickly. In very rare cases, the main page can be protected - there are two levels of protection available, and, if you must protect, try the lower ("autoconfirmed") level first. This will prevent edits from the newest users and those who are not logged in. If you must protect the main page due to vandalism, please do so only for short durations, and always with a expiration date so it is not uneditable forever if you are absent from the wiki.

Larger wikis with complex main pages may choose to place content in templates, which make it easier for wiki regulars to keep the page up to date, while making it harder for vandals to figure out how to disrupt the page.

What if I don't want the title on the main page?
You can hide the pagename on the main page of the wiki with CSS.

When viewing the mainpage of a wiki, the html &lt;body> tag gets a special CSS class called "mainpage". This can be used to style things only on the mainpage, such as hiding the pagename. The system will apply this to whatever pagename is in MediaWiki:Mainpage, so if you rename your mainpage to something else, make sure to update that.

To actually hide the pagename header, just add this to your MediaWiki:Wikia.css: