Style Guide

This style guide represents the agreed-upon conventions of the wiki's community as to how the wiki should be constructed. It is by no means finalized and is likely subject to change as more efficient organization/design practices come about. For newer users, this should be a useful way to understand how to craft your article to meet the wiki's standards.

Voice and Language

Most of the first Gods were created by Varian, and were given multifarious, yet very specific domains over which they ruled (e.g. Severn's realm concerned lies and deceit; Slyphe governed storms and ocean-based life forms). These beings created the first races of Aetolia, and blessed them with some of Their essence, enabling them to breathe underwater, fly in the air, dig deep into the earth, or other vital qualities.

- Excerpt from Gods

The wiki strives to be as informative as possible, and to that extent, explains every concept of Aetolia in concise, modern language. Try to avoid using prose or being overly descriptive when not needed.

Headers and subheaders

Headers are extremely important in AetoliaWiki; not only do they help visually separate information, they also create segmented chunks of text that can be individually edited, linked to, etc.

Header conventions

Headers are created by surrounding text in = equal = signs. Using more ==== equal ==== signs will create different sorts of headers, each with decreasing emphasis and visual prominence.

• We always begin with level two headers. Level one headers are not permitted, because they follow the exact same format as the page's name at the top of the article, and therefore can be subject to site style changes.

== el'Jaziran Economy ==

• When moving to a different topic under the same realm of information in that header, you use a subheader:

=== The Slave Trade ===

• Headers are written in title case (all objects except for "the", "a", "in", "of", etc. are capitalized).

Categories

Pages that represent a catalog of similar articles. Can hold subcategories, and their own content.

• Mimicking Wikipedia, category pages should not contain a full length article, and at most, should simply describe what the category is for. A 'main article' should be used to describe the concept in detail.

Ex: Category:Mythos states that it is for pages pertaining to Aetolian lore. The Mythos page gives a summary of Aetolian lore and could feature things like recommended articles, major important events (Dreikathi invasion, Grand Artifice, etc.), so on and so forth.

Subcategories

Subcategories are good! They are a way to further sort and organize information in the wiki. Subcategory is an artificial term; it is simply a category that happens to reside in another category.

• Pages should not belong to a category and one of its subcategories. If this is the case, remove all but the lowest-end category/categories.

Ex: Asper should be categorized as an island area and a subcontinent/landmass area, but not belong to the Areas category.

Naming Conventions

• Articles should never begin with "The" if it can be helped. The reason for this is that MediaWiki counts this word when it alphabetizes articles; when browsing categories, all articles beginning with "The" appear under "T", making it difficult to find what you want.

Handling Redirections

To prevent us from having to enter [[Aalen Forest|The Aalen Forest]] every time we want to link to the correctly-named article, we use redirections.

• A redirection page is a page that contains this token and nothing else:

#REDIRECT [[My Page]]

• Attempting to navigate to a redirection page simply sends you to the intended page!

Templates

We all play a text-based game via programmable clients, so the concept of templates should come naturally: they are basically functions or objects made for the wiki.

• For any complex design or snippet of information you find yourself having to write more than once, consider creating a template.

Ex 1: Writing syntax for skills can be tedious, requiring the use of <pre> tags or something equally hideous. Instead, a {{syntax}} template saves a lot of typing, and the advantage is that you only need to modify the template to change the way syntax fields look across the entire wiki!

Ex 2: Tables don't really count. They are about as simple as they will possibly get.

Areas

Area pages are marked with the {{AreaPage}} template. Obviously, these are articles for the various areas, or player-accessible zones, of the game.

Naming Area Pages

• See Naming Conventions above: Vashnar Mountains is preferred over The Vashnar Mountains, if only because then our category pages don't have massive clusters of articles under the "T" alphabetical listing.
• In using the AreaPage template, you should add a type as well: {{AreaPage|type=Mountains}}. Write the type in title case.
  • If, in assigning your article a type, it creates a new category, please open that category's page and add [[Category:Areas]] to it.

Correcting Pages

This wiki is very much a work in progress, and as of this writing requires significant changes to its infrastructure, to better facilitate future editing and readability.

Help Files Needing Expansion

• These are articles that were ripped from help files in-game. We can do much better than this. The wiki exists to go above and beyond the brief tidbits of information the game's files put on offer. Ways to tell the article is just a copy:

1. Typing HELP <article name> brings up its exact text.
2. The page's source contains the same 80-character line widths as the game.

If you see a page like this and don't have the time to make it awesome, please apply the template {{HelpExpansion}} to the top. This will put it in a category that makes it easy for other editors to see that it needs work.