Difference between revisions of "Manual of Style"

Revision as of 13:35, 28 January 2014

The Guild of Thieves, Cutpurses and Allied Trades Manual of Style

THis Manual of Style is a collection of rules-of-thumb and guidelines for giving our Wiki a consistent look and feel. Many of these rules have exceptions, but to put together a good reference work collaboratively, it's best to follow the rules unless they're quite inappropriate for a particular situation.

The manual is broken up into different pages so that this one doesn't get overloaded with extraneous text. It makes it easier to find and update individual rules or concepts if they're on their own pages.

Also, having separate articles makes it easier to link to the particular rule being broken from discussion pages for articles and in edit summaries.

If all this stuff makes your head swim, and you don't want to bother with it, by all means plunge forward and just start sharing your knowledge. Other people will come through and bring your contributions more in line with the style guide.

If you have a question about the specifics of the manual, or want to see it changed/amended/clarified, use the discussion page for the section in question. A list of issues currently being discussed will be created there. Alternatively you can contact Danduin in game.

Structure

This section of the manual is for rules about the structure of the Wiki as a whole.

Formatting

These rules are about laying out individual articles. That is, they describe how we take raw information and put it in a format that's easily usable by all.

=Section Headers

Wiki markup has a specific format for section headers. Section headers should start with two equal signs. If there are sub-sections of the sections, their headers start with three equal signs, and sub-sub-sections get four equal signs, etc.

For example:

==Section 1==

===Section 1.1===

===Section 1.2===

====Section 1.2.1====

Section headers should be separated from text above with one blank line like this:

previous section had lots of text but
that's all you need to know.

==Talk==
The people of Ephebe speak Ephebian.

Capitalisation

For section headers, capitalise the first word in the title, and any proper names. Everything else should be lower case.

Sentences

Use just one space to separate the ending punctuation mark of one sentence from the beginning of the next sentence.

(The MediaWiki software that the Wiki uses will always display sentences separated by just one space, however many spaces you waste in your original text, so why not save a few bytes.)

Writing

This set of rules describes how to write words, sentences, and paragraphs.