User:Melofors/IAS style guide
| Policy & Help pages | |
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| General | |
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| Style & Layout | |
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A Style Guide is a general outline of how an article should be laid out for both easy viewing and editing. This guide will cover certain scenarios that you may see in an article and how to go about either applying or fixing it to the betterment of the wiki as a whole.
As with many guides, this is meant to give a general idea on how to lay out an article and and not all topics listed here may apply in every case. As an article could contain anything, apply what makes the most sense for each to provide a consistent flow from article to article.
General Article Style
- Articles should be capitalized appropriately depending on the player/base name, looking to achieve exact capitalization.
- To italicize, add Template:Italic title near the top of the article
- Do not use A, An, or The as the first word (X+ Nether Highway, not The X+ Nether Highway), unless it is an inseparable part of a name (The Paragon)
- Normally use nouns over noun phrases when setting a heading: 2011, not In 2011
- Whenever quotation marks or apostrophes appear, add a redirect for the same title but using “curly” quotemarks/apostrophes instead of the usual "straight" ones
- When writing articles of history, events should be segmented off in chronological order, with a brief summary at the top of the article summarizing the text.
Images
- All images must be accompanied by a brief caption. Images should be specifically relevant to the article.
General Wiki Style
- No advertisements of any discord server, website, or client associated with 2b2t or any other minecraft server are permitted.
- The wiki should be kept in a third-person, neutral observer perspective at all times. Articles written in a first-person perspective should be rewritten according to proper guidelines.
- Quotation should be used, with attribution, to present emotive opinions that cannot be expressed in a neutral, third-person perspective.
Players
- Players cannot write an article about themselves except for special requests from wiki staff.
- Articles relating to 2b2t players should be accompanied by a side box containing the player's skin and any relevant information, including alternate accounts, past usernames, and any known affiliations.
Bases
- Only griefed bases should have an active wiki article on them. Non-griefed but still large bases (ex. Valinor, Mozukai Island), should be added to the wiki once they have fallen.
Conventions
- Within a given article the conventions of one particular name should be followed consistently.
- Use universally accepted terms rather than those less widely distributed, but provide the irrelevant terms somewhere in the page as well or as a redirect.
- If one variant appears in a title, make a redirect page to accommodate the others
- Please follow grammar rules of either UK or US English, either should be fine.
- Do not use unwarranted abbreviations without expanding the abbreviation or linking to the article.
- Do not invent abbreviations or acronyms for bases unless they already exist.
HTML format
- Either the element or the Template:Abbr template can be used for abbreviations and acronyms.
- Use ... or ... for emphasis.
- For a link to function, any italics markup must be either completely outside the link markup.
Ex. Incorrect: He left the server with ''Kings Landing'' still unfinished. Correct: He left the server with Kings Landing still unfinished.
- Block quotations can be enclosed in
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{{{1}}} | 
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or
...
.
Project:Style Guide/General|General Project:Style Guide/Article style guidelines|Article style guidelines </tabview>
Article Flow
The first thing to consider with any article is the concept of Article Flow. This means how easy is it to read and distinguish between it's contents as well as how consistent it is. The main part in most articles will be the text about the topic(s) covered and will be what the viewer will most likely interested in. If a viewer can read the text from top to bottom of the article with minimal disruptions in the "flow" of the text, this is considered as good article flow. However, if the text is disrupted by things such as Images, Videos, Tables, etc in rapid succession, this can cause the viewer to lose their place and lose focus on what they were reading which leads to bad article flow.
Headers and Sections
Headers should be used to differentiate between different sections about particular subjects about the topic the article is describing as well as sub-sections of sections.
When making new sections, you should consider the following
- Consider if having content in a new section is justified.
- Avoid sections that are two to three sections long
- Make sure that the content for that section is different enough in terms of the topic.
- Otherwise, such content should probably be part of an already existing section.
Images and Videos
Images and Videos are graphical elements that can be added to the article as well as the wiki and can be used to provide visual reference to the article content.
When placing an image/video,
- Place it at the start/end of a paragraph
- It is recommended that images/videos near text should be limited to 300px in width maximum.
- If the image/video is placed in it's own section or there is no text to the sides of it, the maximum width can be exceeded if desired.
Good Example
Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah.
Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah.
Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah.
Bad Example
Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah
Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah
Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah.
Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah Blah blah blah.
Infoboxes
Infoboxes are an element that provides quick details about a topic. For example, it can give a quick summery on a podcast noting things such as the episode title, number, air date, and featured speakers.
- Infoboxes should not contain a lot of information and should limit themselves to around four to five rows of information on average and contain one sentence of information maximum.
Tables
Tables are elements that organize a dataset about a subject and/or used for formatting purposes. These are commonly used for listing statistics about a series of items such as noting things about fruits including how much they weight and what their price is.
This element has some special properties such as:
- Relative size as a percentage (Ex. width: 75%)
- Styles for borders, text, and background color,
- Can be sortable and/or collapsible
It is recommended that editors get acquainted with editing tables using Source Mode in the editor as many of these options are not easily accessible in Visual Mode. You may also want to look at utilizing CSS for tables as that is what many of the options are based on.
When creating and customizing a table, it's contents need to be readable so it should be avoided that it does not use low-contrasting colors such as a blue background color with black text. It also should not be too tall or wide where it either goes outside the article space or there is more space in each table cell then what the content takes up.
Good Example
| Header 1 | Header 2 | Header 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Header Row 1 | Cell 1 | Cell 2 |
| Header Row 2 | Cell 1 | Cell 2 |
- Table uses a CSS class called "article-table" which applies a consistent style to table body, rows and cell elements. It also uses a border.
- Width is set using a relative size within the article space of 65%.
- Table uses rows which are automatically place their text in bold by default.
- The second and third row use CSS applied to the row as a whole instead of per cell.
Bad Example
| Header 1 | Header 2 | Header 3 |
| Header Row 1 | Cell 1 | Cell 2 |
| Header Row 2 | Cell 1 | Cell 2 |
- Table does not use a CSS class at all.
- Width and height are set at a fixed size of 1000px by 200px which causes the table to take more space then it needs to (and flies off the article itself) and prevents it from resizing based on the browser size.
- Table does not use rows.
- The second and third row use CSS applied to the rows but the choice in color is poor which makes it difficult to see the row's contents.
Links
One of the best things about wikis is the ability to add links to other sources of information. There are two kinds of links that can be created: Interwiki links and external links.
When adding links to the wiki, please keep these things in mind:
- If a word or phase is referring to another topic on the wiki, consider creating a local Interwiki link.
- When linking to another wiki, do so as an Interwiki link as opposed to an external link.
(Ex. w:starwars:Jedi will link to Jedi on starwars.wiki.com aka Wookiepedia; Wikipedia:Jedi will link similarly to Jedi on Wikipedia) - Avoid creating multiple links to the same article and/or url in within the same paragraph/section. This is to help reduce unnessecary visual noise as well as redundancy.
- Do not link directly to disambiguous articles. Create a link directly to the desired article instead.