Nobody likes walls of text. By this point most people know that you should have short, sweet paragraphs with line breaks between them. The shorter, the better. If you’re ever debating whether or not to end the paragraph and add a line break, err on the side of “yes”.

Once you understand this principle, you can generalize it to other aspects of your writing. For example, I stole the Last Psychiatrist’s style of section breaks – bold headers saying I., II., III., etc. Now instead of just paragraph breaks, you have two forms of break – paragraph break and section break. On some of my longest posts, including the Anti-Reactionary FAQ and Meditations on Moloch, I add a third level of break – in the first case, a supersection level in large fonts, in the latter, a subsection level with an underlined First, Second, etc. Again, if you’re ever debating more versus fewer breaks, err on the side of “more”.

Finishing a paragraph or section gives people a micro-burst of accomplishment and reward. It helps them chunk the basic insight together and remember it for later. You want people to be going – “okay, insight, good, another insight, good, another insight, good” and then eventually you can tie all of the insights together into a high-level insight. Then you can start over, until eventually at the end you tie all of the high-level insights together. It’s nice and structured and easy to work with. If they’re just following a winding stream of thought wherever it’s going, it’ll take a lot more mental work and they’ll get bored and wander off.

Remember that clickbait comes from big media corporations optimizing for easy readability, and that the epitome of clickbait is the listicle. But the insight of the listicle applies even to much more sophisticated intellectual pieces – people are much happier to read a long thing if they can be tricked into thinking it’s a series of small things.

Source

But I don't know how!

That's easy, just scroll down to and find out!

But I'll just ruin everything!

No, you won't. Every change you make has to be reviewed by one of our wiki admins before going live, so you really couldn't if you tried.

But my English is bad!

I promise you, nobody else will care about this as much as you do. Personally, I'm so happy about the guide/wiki page's existence that I love the author all the more for not letting grammar get in the way.

That being said, if you really feel uncomfortable publishing anything in "bad English", we can solve that! You can either add it to the (e.g. "PLEASE FIX GRAMMAR my guide about stuff"), or run your text through ChatGPT (this is exactly what LLMs are for!)

But this is just speculation! I haven't verified it!

No problem at all, just pop an info box at the top of your wiki page or section:

This stuff is not verified! If you can confirm it (or find out how it really works), please update this page or get in touch with (you) via (however)!

... and then go ahead. Remember, wikis are collaborative! Once you've put a foundation, others can pitch in and improve.

But I have only half-understood this!

Imagine the following situation:

In a world without wikis, you want to edit the colour of a car. After a bracing journey, you make it to the Discord server, where you find the textures-and-materials channel and ask. Someone cheerfully tells you:

Cyberpunk doesn't use textured materials, so you'll have to edit a multilayered file. For that, you're gonna want MLSetupBuilder, it's linked all over the place, there's also a channel somewhere under tools, or was it a thread? I dunno!

<they ping the tool's creator, who is not responding — presumably AFK>

Ah, nvm. Just use the search function, you'll find people talking about this!

<you use the search function. There are thousands of hits.>

That is why even a shitty wiki page is better than none. At the very least, it's a point to collect information and links.

Besides, from personal experience — writing guides helps me to understand a process much better.

But I'm just me! Why can't someone competent write this?

There are two kinds of people: those who can write documentation and those who don't. A lot of people simply suck at explaining things (I'm sure you had at least one of those as a teacher), which rules them out for creating wiki guides.

That leaves a much smaller group, which again splits in two halves: those who hate writing documentation, and those who don't.

So you're looking for a competent person who is good at explaining things and doesn't hate making guides. That's not very many people, and most of them have other things to do besides writing wiki pages (making mods, developing tools, slaving away for a corporation to earn a living wage, you name it). Sure, if you wait long enough, someone will probably get around to it, but... chances are that it's someone just like you.

OK, I'm sold! I'll edit as soon as...

With all due respect, DO IT NOW!

Because "as soon as" never comes.

You'll be killed by a dropping anvil. Or you will be replaced by bodystealers from the dark side of the moon, who never intended to edit. Or while double-checking your facts, you'll notice another rabbit hole that you want to go down first. Or you'll forget about it. Or real life will get in the way.

Get that information out of your head and into a change request. If you never finish up on it, somebody else will — but at least your knowledge doesn't die with you.

Good luck, soldier!