Project Mara Wiki:Manual of Style

The Manual of Style is the style manual for all articles. It is used to establish consistency across the project, but is not applicable to every situation. This guideline doesn't spell out all English rules, rules pertaining to wiki editing, etc. Rather, its focus is on issues specific or important to the.

Wikipedia's Manual of Style may be referenced for very generalized conventions, but with discretion, as some elements may not be consistent with this community's standards. The most glaring contradictions may be covered in this page, though this guideline is not intended to be a fork or diff of Wikipedia's Manual of Style.

Template documentations are considered auxiliary pages to the Manual of Style, but with a scope exclusive to the use of their respective template.

General style

 * The specific dialect of English used should favor that of the game and its developer's locale.
 * The only exception to this is the preference of logical quotation over American punctuation. This is to maintain an encyclopedic style and is not a preference based on regional style.
 * When titling articles, use proper English capitalization rules rather than going by in-game capitalization. Proper nouns should use title case, while common nouns should use sentence case.
 * When titling articles, use proper English capitalization rules rather than going by in-game capitalization. Proper nouns should use title case, while common nouns should use sentence case.

Representation

 * Articles should be titled according to their topic's most representative name (i.e. the name most commonly used).
 * For characters, their full names should be used. Omit prefixes, titles, and honorifics (see &sect; Redirects below).
 * The main image of an article should be of the subject's most recent canonical appearance.

Redirects
Redirects help guide readers to the correctly titled page when there is a discrepancy about how the article might be named. However, they should only be created and used sparingly, for maintenance, usability, and SEO reasons.


 * Redirects should be created for topics with multiple, frequently used, sourced names. This may include the prefixes, titles, or honorifics applied to character names. Spelling variations may also warrant redirects if both spellings are used consistently across a single source.


 * Redirects should always be created for when two articles are merged, or when a single article covers multiple topics, such as with achievement names.
 * In these cases, the redirect should point to a specific subsection if applicable (avoiding stacking).
 * The redirect should be categorized appropriately if the original article's topic is hypothetically notable in-universe, is substantially different from its parent article, or has a unique, proper name given to it.


 * Links to redirects in articles should be avoided. While they may be functional, they cause route fragmentation, are less optimal for SEO, and are not future-proof. Furthermore, it is more syntactically semantic to link the proper article title, while modifying the output text if needed.

Article layout
There are no fixed guidelines concerning the layout of an article, as each has different needs. However, articles should be as consistent as possible with comparable articles. This section attempts to document the existing, organically established conventions across different article types, but may not always be entirely accurate. When in doubt, check major articles.

Although the following guideline is not strict, it is a requirement to be consistent with any prevalent conventions where possible.

Skeleton
An article's "skeleton" is the most ubiquitous element of its structure. It consists of a lede, a body, and an appendix.


 * The lede is a condensed version of the body. It serves as an introduction to the article, although generally it should not contain any unique information (and therefore rarely needs to use citations).
 * The lede is the first part of the article, and should be placed before any level 2 section headers (or smaller), but after any introductory templates (infoboxes, message boxes, or the appearances template).
 * The first sentence of a lede should include the article's name and any alternative names in bold, the type or category the topic belongs to (e.g. "character", "faction", "location"), and the games in which it appeared. The first sentence should be as brief and definitional as possible.


 * The body contains the article's comprehensive, detailed, and organized information. Its primary focus is on canonical and gameplay information.
 * This generally includes, in the following order: historical information (lore, relevant missions and cutscenes), characteristics information (appearance, behavior, etc.), and gameplay information (combat, performance, strategies, etc.)
 * The creation of subsections should be proportionate to the length of the parent section, similar to the notability standards applied for the splitting or merging of articles.
 * Historical information should be written from an in-universe point of view, meaning for example the use of the protagonist's name rather than "the player", the writing should always be in past tense, and history-related sections should not mention out-of-universe facts.
 * The opposite is true of gameplay and characteristics sections, which describe facts from an out-of-universe perspective and should thus be written in the present tense, and may use the term "the player" rather than the protagonist's name if appropriate.


 * The appendix contains any supplementary information, namely: behind the scenes sections, galleries, see also sections, notes (annotations and citations), references, navbox templates, and category links. The tense within these sections should use whatever is most appropriate; if the events described in "Behind the scenes" sections, for example, are from the past, use the past tense.

Note that for shorter articles, the body may not be separated from the lede by a section header. For significantly short articles, the lede may be fully detailed and serve as the body.

Game scripts
Game scripts are full verbal transcripts of a particular game. They are not the original scripts, but instead transcriptions from the final product.

The exact formatting of a script should be consistent with the most complete script. Individualized guidelines and notes concerning the way in which a transcript was made and organized should be placed in the lede of that article. Otherwise, all scripts may abide by the following guideline:
 * Transcribe dialogue based on the actual spoken words with proper English punctuation and casing. Do not go by the in-game subtitles, which are often erroneous.
 * Script page section headers should be named after their cutscene names (found in scene players), or their corresponding mission names (found in mission lists, level select, or in-game prompts).
 * Lines should be separated based on their execution. Just because consecutive lines are spoken by the same character does not mean they're part of the same line.
 * Descriptions of non-verbal actions (or cinematic context) should not be included. However, trigger- or context-dependent lines should be indicated in parentheses.
 * If multiple lines may be spoken by the same character at random or in a repeating cycle by the same trigger, use a bulleted list with the character's name as a description term (using ).
 * Never capitalize, embolden, or italicize emphasized words within the dialogue. Emphasis is subjective and prone to inconsistencies; however, if consensus determines that something should be emphasized, use italics and never the former two.
 * Enclose words in square brackets that may or may not be spoken depending on the variation of the line.