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guide:style

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Style Guide

The Style Guide is an ongoing attempt to build a reference resource for use by authors of Star Army articles.

:!: Work in Progress. Inspired by Wikipedia's Manual of Style.

General Principles

  • Articles should be internally consistent.
  • Articles of a common type (such as starships or guns) should adhere to a common format.
  • Don't create pages that are not linked to from other wiki pages (orphans). Create the link first, then follow it and create the page. Stray pages will be deleted!
  • If you move a page, first use the backlink link (at the bottom of every wiki page) to see what pages are linking to it. ALL OF THOSE PAGES SHOULD BE UPDATED! If not, you are creating broken links. Do not move a page unless you're willing to do the work of updating all those pages.

Article Titles And Section Headings

  1. ALWAYS title your pages! The first header determined your page title and should generally match the page URL.
  2. Article titles should not include “The” unless that is part of a proper noun such as a name. The same goes for “a” and “an.”
  3. When you create a page, the URL should generally be the same as the title (or a short form), including spaces. Don't create pages with URLs that are all a big blob.
    • stararmy:standard issue items (GOOD)
    • stararmy:standardissueitems (BAD!)
  4. On starship classes: The format is Classname-class Shiptype, always with a hypen OR Classname Shiptype. This should be the case in both URL and in article content. Examples: Nozomi-class Scout (GOOD) Plumeria Gunship (GOOD) Nozomi class Scout (BAD!)
  5. Titles and section headers should be concise.
  6. Titles should be consistent with page URLs.
  7. In general, abbreviations should not be used as titles (use Imperial Registry Number, not IRN).
  8. Article titles should be capitalized but not in all caps. (“Creating a Character” not “Creating a character” or “CREATING A CHARACTER”).
  9. Article titles should be nouns or noun phrases.
  10. Do not use an ampersand (&) or other special characters in a title unless they are part of an organization's official name.
  11. Leave space on either side of the title or section heading and a blank line before them.

Article Content

  1. Avoid the use of second-person language (you, your) in articles other than instructions for the player.
  1. Proper nouns should be linked in their first usage for each page (or major section, if preferred).
  2. Never use a full URL (starting with http) to link to an internal page when an internal link will do.
  3. Use spaces rather than underscores in links.
  4. “Sub-Articles” (such as inventory pages) should always link back to their parent page.

Images

  1. Images should be less than 500 KB is size
  2. Images should be less than 700px wide
  3. Images should have an alternate text value to help visually impaired people who use page readers. Place a | after the image file name, and then type a short meaningful text description. eg. |Really cool item
  4. Only images hosted on Star Army should be used on Star Army wiki pages. Images hosted on third-party sites such as imageshack and photobucket will be edited out of articles.

See also: Wiki Namespaces


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guide/style.1339549255.txt.gz · Last modified: 2023/12/20 15:53 (external edit)