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What is QMAW, anyway?
QMAW stands for Quick Manual And Wiki. While the word "wiki" might give the impression that it should be a complete description of certain topics, that is not actually the case. Navigation is handled mostly over hyperlinks in the text, much like a wiki, but the actual content adheres the "quick manual" part of the name.
So how should a QMAW page be written?
Concise and informative. It may be enticing to simply write down everything you can think of about a certain topic, but that's not exactly useful. QMAW is primarily a simple to digest guide for starters, and as such, topics should only be described as deeply as they have to be.
A simple way to explain this concept is as such: Pretend you are a new player, you don't know a whole lot about the mod in general, just the basics that got you as far into progression as you are, and you now for the first time encounter a topic: What information about that topic would be the most useful right now? A player who is reading about crude oil will most likely be in the stage of using crude oil for the first time. That will include drilling for oil, the most important products derived from oil which are required to progress from that step, and a few other oil related things one might expect in the near future, assuming they are important enough to mention. That is it. One could explain every single oil processing step, every recipe, and every machine involved, but that is not exactly useful for people who are only going to be working with a very small set of those machines in the coming hours.
What shouldn't a QMAW page contain?
- Things that simply aren't relevant to players who are the most likely to read the given page
- Lengthy explanations of recipes (to some extent that can be useful, for example pointing towards the next progression material derived from the topic in question), since NEI already covers those
- Very fine details on how things are used (ideally, by understanding the subject, people will figure that out themselves), although general instructions on difficult topics are sometimes needed (for example, even with the particle accelerator pages, some people may not manage to build a functioning accelerator, which is why a step-by-step construction guide was included)
Conclusion
A lot of people have short attention spans, so don't write an entire novel that no one's going to read. Keep the info short, but include everything that is actually relevant at the point when the player is expected to look that page up. And most importantly, double check if your info is correct - no information is better than wrong information.
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