Forum:Updating policies, guidelines and the wiki/MoS
From Halopedia, the Halo wiki
This Manual of Style is a guide applicable to all Halopedia articles. It reflects Halopedia's standards, and is intended to help editors to produce articles with language, layout, and formatting that are consistent, clear, and precise. The goal of Halopedia is to make the whole encyclopedia easier, intuitive to use and the most definitive source for all Halo information.
General
Internal consistency
An overriding principle is that style and formatting choices should be consistent within a Halopedia article, though not necessarily throughout Halopedia as a whole. Consistency within an article promotes clarity and cohesion.
Stability of articles
Editors should not change an article from one guideline-defined style to another without a substantial reason unrelated to mere choice of style, and that revert-warring over optional styles is unacceptable. Where there is disagreement over which style to use in an article, start a discussion on the talk page of the article and try to find ways to overcome the issue.
Follow the sources
Many points of usage, such as the treatment of proper names, can be decided by observing the style adopted by high-quality sources. Unless there is a clear reason to do otherwise, follow the usage of reliable English-language secondary sources on the subject. If the sources can be shown to be unrepresentative of current English usage, follow current English usage instead—and consult more sources.
Clarity
Writing should be clear and concise. Plain English works best: avoid jargon, and vague or unnecessarily complex wording. Remember, the encyclopedia is aimed at late high school, early college reading proficiency, and general educational levels. Articles should be fully comprehensible to non-specialists.
Nomenclature
There is tension between the academic approach that names and classifies by the perspective of the field, and the layman's approach that uses common names and classifies according to common practice. We should try to accommodate the layman's approach wherever possible. The longer technical name may be described in parentheses the first time it is used.
Styles
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Much of the styles you see in this manual of style is based on Wikipedia's manual of style, however in some cases Halopedia will differ from Wikipedia. You can find a more detailed guide of this in the Layout guide The following specific style conventions will be used by Halopedia:
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Perspectives in articles
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When writing an article based on canon content, the author should do so from an in-universe perspective. In other words, imagine Halopedia like a CAA Factbook that records everything in the Halo universe. With that being said, the author should always use third-person writing and do so in past tense. Real-world content is the only exception to this and it must be written from an out-universe perspective. For example, plot summaries must use present tense to maintain the narrative. Chapter summaries summarize a chapter's events in a "this is what happens in this chapter" fashion, as opposed to a "this is what happened in that chapter" fashion. |
- DO NOT include redundant phrases like "his ultimate fate is unknown" or "what happened to the ship after that is a mystery."
Do not use conversational style
As Halopedia is an open encyclopedia site, it should read like online encyclopedia. To be more specific, it should be something like Wikipedia.
- Check your spelling and grammar. Do not use internet slang (ex. "How r u?" or "c u 2nite"). If you are not 100% sure about the way a word is spelled, type it into Google or Dictionary.com. If you know that you are not the strongest speller, compose your edits in a word processor like Microsoft Word or use an Internet browser like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome, which has spell-checking built in.
- Do not "reply" to content others have posted. If you think a particular point warrants discussion, post on the article's talk page. If you are 100% sure that something should be changed and do not think a discussion is necessary, just change it. Dialogue goes only on articles' talk pages or the forum.
- Avoid using second-person narrative in articles. As noted earlier, this wiki should read like an encyclopedia.
- Never abbreviate the names of characters or places. Wherever possible, use the full name of a character the first time they are mentioned. After the first mention, you may refer to "Master Chief" as "the Chief" or "Captain Jacob Keyes" as "Keyes" and so forth. It is acceptable to abbreviate the title in some cases, including names that are commonly abbreviated in official material, such as "UNSC" as opposed to "United Nations Space Command".
Editing
Avoid making multiple edits in an article
Halopedia is a point system-based wiki. Whenever one makes an edit, one is rewarded 50 points regardless of the amount of contribution contributed. Though it sounds fun, excessive amount of edits in an article can lead to a block. As such, editors are reminded to edit an article to a maximum of three.
A simple way of avoiding this problem is to practice using the Preview button which allows you to review the contributions you made before saving them.
Use the "Minor Edit" button
If you are making a minor edit (e.g. fixing a spelling error or tweaking formatting), check the "This is a minor edit" button below the Summary box before saving the page. Again, this will make things easier for the rest of us.
Use the Preview Button
The preview button is right next to the save edit button, and is there for a reason. It's your own personal spell checker, link checker, whatever-else checker. Use it. Users that purposefully do not preview edits as to inflate their edit count are not well regarded amongst Halopedians, and you may find yourself in trouble with an administrator.
Do not sign your edits
All contributions are appreciated, but if every user left their mark on every contribution they made, the Wiki would be nothing but signatures. If you have made an edit that you are particularly proud of (such as a transcript or screenshot), the correct place to take credit is on your own user page. If you do not have a user account, we respect your anonymity, but your edits will remain anonymous, too.
Do sign your talk posts
If you make a post on a discussion page, please sign it. If you have a user account, this is as easy as typing ~~~~ at the end of your post. If you do not have a user account, just sign it with your name or nickname so everybody can tell who is who when reading long conversations. Even better, create an account anyway and use the signature method described. There really is no reason not to if you are going to stick around.
Using Images/Files
- Add only canon image, not screenshots from customized/tweaked canon games or mods.
- Avoid uploading pictures you don't have a purpose for, unless they can add to a subject gallery. Before uploading, read Help:Images for more information on image use.
Layout
Stubs
If you do not know enough information on a topic, or you know there's more, add a stub to it. To do so, try this:
{{stub}}
And people will know that it's a stub by looking at the stub category. Generally the {{stub}} template is put at the bottom of the page.
Do not link to the current page
In other words, a page should not link to itself. If it is attempted, the link will simply turn into bold text.
Link once
A given section of sufficient size should only contain one link to any other page. If a page links to Captain Jacob Keyes in one place, then that should be the only link to Captain Jacob Keyes in that section. Typically this link should be the first instance of the term in the article.
External links
External links are links that point to sites other than the Wiki. The links should be in the form of a bullet list. External links typically look like this:
[http://www.bungie.net/filename.html '''The Website''': ''Title of the article'']
Headers/Headings
Never make a header title as links. Instead, use the Main Redirect Template and add it under the header. Additionally, avoid adding the Ref Tag to the header.
See also
Ref
Comments
Metric vs. US customary
My primary concern with this guide is that it expressly favors US customary over metric. Although using American English clearly makes the most sense for this wiki, I must argue that the same cannot be said for US customary (aka imperial) vs metric. Time and time again Halo media has shown that metric is the standard of measurement for the UNSC (with only a few exceptions, i.e. Halo: The Cole Protocol). As the majority of our articles are written from an in-universe perspective, it only makes sense to put metric measurements first followed by US customary in brackets. That being said, this is already being used as the de facto policy for nearly all articles already; virtually the only pages which use US first are the pages for John-117, Avery Junior Johnson and Jacob Keyes. We might as well go ahead and make metric the official policy since we're pretty much there already.-- Rusty - 112 02:34, 26 May 2012 (EDT)
- Makes sense... and I'm sure the American audience wouldn't mind. :) — subtank 06:29, 26 May 2012 (EDT)