Style Guide

Revision as of 06:44, 23 April 2012 by Lin (talk | contribs)

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.

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.

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

  • 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.