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.
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:
- Typing HELP <article name> brings up its exact text.
- 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.