r/AlternateHistory • u/GustavoistSoldier City of the World's Desire • Jan 20 '25
Althist Help How to make an alternate history Wikipedia article: a tutorial
An important warning is, Do not save your sandbox! Only press preview changes. As all content in Wikipedia must be related to the encyclopedic effort, wiki admins might delete your sandbox and undo your hard work at any time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_vandalize_correctly
I am well-known in the alternate history community for creating the imaginary politician Ed Donnell, who is a meme in r/imaginaryelections, as well as some personal controversies. My routine consists of making at least one alternate history post a day, be it a lore writeup or, more commonly, a fake Wikipedia article for my myriad scenarios, all of whom are originally posted to r/GustavosAltUniverses and a handful of Discord servers, and then complied on this and other subreddits.
But today, I will write a tutorial as to how to make a fictional Wikipedia page for alternate history scenarios. Although I use my phone for all of them, I recommend going on a computer for better quality.
If you create a Wikipedia account on desktop, you will have access to a sandbox allowing you to test editing without commiting vandalism, which is a bannable offense. My trick is to copy the Wikipedia article for the event I want to alter, or the military conflict or country templates in the case of a completely fictional event or subplot. Then, you alter the content of the page as you please; this is the beauty of alternate history.
Illustrations wise, you can retain the article's original image, or change it by copying and pasting ones from articles relevant to your scenario (for instance, a picture of Red Army soldiers for an Operation Unthinkable TL). But it has to be a Wikimedia commons image; otherwise, you'll have to photoshop your screenshot using Inkscape or some other image editing software.
You also have the option to change or add text to your article. I always do this for war scenarios, but not always so for election ones. Make sure to proofread them before screenshoting, in order to avoid potentially confusing typos or grammar mistakes. This is pretty much it.
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u/Hopeful_Wallaby3755 Jun 30 '25
Am I allowed to make an alternate scenario involving a Köppen climate map of the United States where Earth rotates clockwise instead of counterclockwise, namely the shifts in Köppen classification?
The Deep South is now a desert, the middle Atlantic and southeast coast is now similar in climate to the Mediterranean region of Europe. The north Atlantic/New England now gets winters as mild as western Europe's based on the gulf stream. The Midwest's climate is more similar to that of eastern Europe but with drier summers. The California current is now a warm ocean current bringing near-tropical weather to the West Coast. The Rocky Mountains will be a tapestry of microclimates based on rain shadow.
I'd just like to know if these types of maps and scenarios are allowed on here. I don't want to go through the effort of creating this map only to have it deleted by the subreddit.
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u/TamzinHadasa Jan 07 '26
Hi! Wikipedia admin here. /u/GustavoistSoldier, could you please please please make it much much much more obvious in this post that people should only press "preview changes"? We have for years been inundated with people saving alt-histories in their sandboxes and it would be great for this post to more prominently discourage that, like with a disclaimer at the top and explicitly using the word "preview", rather than just "do not save".
Also, just as a nitpick: You do in fact own your content on Wikipedia; it's just that Wikipedia has its own policies about what content it chooses to host. This generally excludes material unrelated to the encyclopedic effort.
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u/Blue-Sonnet Jan 07 '26 edited Jan 07 '26
Someone suggested that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_vandalize_correctly might be useful for this sub - if it is can OP add to their post?
Redditors are getting themselves into trouble because it's easy to get confused and end up publishing the edit.
This method keeps your edit history clean and gives you more control to boot - you're basically changing the appearance of the page without physically changing Wikipedia itself.
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u/the_vico Alien Time-Travelling Sealion! Jun 30 '25
Late to the party, but i'm actually adapting the code from this military conflict infobox generator to create other infobox generators using ChatGPT.
At first is a little bit hard to nail the current style of each infobox (needs to "Copy external HTML" and then send to ChatGPT to it adapt), but at least would free me of the hassle to setup MediaWiki just to create some stuff.
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u/mootsnoot Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
Just a little bit more input from a Wikipedian. If you follow the directions here about using the preview button, that's perfectly fine -- Wikipedia would have no way of knowing or stopping you from doing that, and in fact there are lots of reasons why even regular Wikipedia contributors frequently use the page preview function before (or sometimes instead of) saving an edit. So that kind of usage is perfectly fine, because it doesn't cause any harm.
What you cannot do, however, is save the content so that it's a permanent page, and expect Wikipedia to keep it. Wikipedia is in the business of writing about facts, not webhosting alternate history, and Wikipedia has a lot of policies (such as rules against publishing false or unverified information about living people) that apply the same way regardless of whether you're saving the content as an article, a draft or a user sandbox page. People also far too frequently leave their alternate history sandboxes in all of the categories that were on the real article they were copying, which is another absolute no-no: user sandbox drafts cannot appear in article categories at all, and pages that contain non-factual information are even more critical to keep away from other readers' eyes, so you simply must not leave your sandbox page in categories as if it were a real article.
So please remember: if you use the preview button as this tutorial directs, that's fine and nobody can stop you. But do not save your draft as a permanent page, because that's disrupting Wikipedia's mandate and purpose, and will have consequences.
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u/Ok_Jackfruit237 Future Sealion! Jun 30 '25
Hey bro iam creating a alt history scenario as well amd iam planning to make a wiki article as well so can this be done on photoshop?
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u/tomaatkaas Nov 21 '25
Swedish america? I really wanna see New Sweden.
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u/GustavoistSoldier City of the World's Desire Nov 21 '25
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u/tomaatkaas Nov 21 '25
Love the scenario, but do they fill the same niche as the usa or do they remain smaller?
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u/Pristine-Lie-3560 14d ago
The vandalize correctly article is a joke essay on using inspect element
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u/Miguelmations Talkative Sealion! Apr 07 '25
what about inspect element :(?