Help:Style guide
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CrawlWiki has no formal style guide as of yet, but there are a few conventions in use. The following is a list of them. Changes should be discussed on the talk page.
Contents
Tone
CrawlWiki is not just an encyclopedia of Dungeon Crawl, but articles should be written in a largely encyclopedic tone. That means clearly separating facts from comments, by putting strategy tips in their own section, and comments on the talk page.
Terms used in the game should use Dungeon Crawl's spelling (artefact, armour...), which is generally in Australian English. However, the rest of the wiki should use Americanized spelling and grammar.
Articles about removed features should continue to use present tense, as many previous versions of Crawl are still readily available.
Article names
Try to be consistent with existing articles:
- Name most pages with lowercase letters, like scroll of identify, but use uppercase for proper nouns, like the Royal Jelly. Note that MediaWiki does not allow for the first letter of a page to be lowercase.
- Prefer singular to plural (e.g. Hydra instead of Hydras)
- Redirect acronyms like YASD to pages like Yet Another Stupid Death.
The first time the article name appears in the main text, it should be bolded. This includes the titles of any redirects redirecting to the article.
Version Templates
Factual articles should have a version template attached to it. Let's say the latest stable version was 0.16. Then, these articles should have one of three headers:
- Template:Version016: For articles that are up to date for the current version.
- Template:Version017: For articles about new features that will be added into the next version.
- Template:Obsolete: For articles about something that has been removed from the game.
There may be articles with other version tags, such as:
- Template:Version013, Template:Version012 and so forth:
- Template:Versionunknown
These articles should be updated to one of the three templates above.
Information on future releases
Articles that completely new for the next version of the game receive the Template:version-trunk tag ({{version|trunk}}) or the respective next version tag. However, if adding information to a article that also pertains to the current version, the future information should go in the History subsection of the article, with the Category:Crystal Ball Articles tag ([[Category:Crystal Ball Articles]]) as well.
Redirects
When creating a new article, redirect variations on that name to it to avoid someone duplicating the article under a slightly different title.
The syntax for a redirect is like this:
#REDIRECT [[insert article]]
See the MediaWiki redirects help page for further help with redirects.
New articles
Do not create empty new articles or new articles that contain nothing but the {{stub}} message just in hopes of seeing someone add more content to them. Add the content yourself! If you don't know about the subject, learn about it or ask politely at CrawlWiki's talk page for someone to create the article.
Categories
Categories are not articles. Do not link an article directly to a category page. Category pages are simply to organize lists of related pages in one place. Each new article should have at least one category assigned to it. The naming convention should be: singular for article pages, and plural for categories, so you have Skill to describe skills, and Category:Skills to list the skills.
Capitalization
Capitalizing should be done on proper nouns only. Capitalizing is reserved for uniques and artefacts. The ring of the Nine Firedrakes does get capitals, because that's its name. Notice how the word 'ring' isn't even capitalized, as being a ring isn't special. An amulet of faith is not in title case, either; it is a regular amulet with the faith ego. You don't call a long sword 'the Long Sword', after all.
Species names should generally be in uppercase, as formatted in the manual.
Headers
The highest header level that should be used is ==This==. Do not use =These=, they are reserved for the article main title only. In each article, there should be a brief introduction before going into specifics. This introduction should not have a header, like ==Introduction==, because it is obvious and because when omitting it, the introduction appears before the table of contents as it is supposed to.
Section names
Some sections are common to many articles. Try to use one of these for the section header rather than a variant like "Source", "Previous versions", or "External Links". Known standard sections are:
- Useful Info
- Strategy
- Tips & Tricks
- Trivia
- External links
- See also
- History
- References
The following headers should be used for specific types of articles:
- Desirability - for items, specifically artefacts
- Sources - for items, brands, and status effects
- Layout - for branches
- Effect - for status effects (see Slow, which is both a status and spell)
- Appreciates / Depreciates - for gods
References
References to the source code can be created by adding ref tags: <ref>{{source ref|0.30.0|mon-util.cc|851}}</ref>. All ref tags should immediately follow the text to which the footnote applies, with no intervening space. Refs are placed after adjacent punctuation, not before (apart from the exceptions below).
Exceptions:
- Ref tags are placed before dashes, not after.
- Where a reference/footnote applies only to material within parentheses, the ref tags belong just before the closing parenthesis.
To display references on the page, use the <references /> tag.
Item pages
Each item page should also list the effects of the item, and any messages that item can generate. Tips and strategy relating to that item should go next.
Templates
{{stub}}can be used on a page to plea for someone to expand it. From time to time, some editors will look over Category:Stubs for articles to expand.
{{delete}}adds a page to Category:Candidates for Deletion so that administrators can consider deleting it. Please give a reason in the talk page of an article before adding the Delete template.
A list of templates can be found here.
Sign your posts
When writing on articles/users' talk-pages sign your posts with four tildes, ~~~~. That will automatically expand to your signature with time-stamp.
General principles
Consider consulting Wikipedia's Manual of Style on the matter; some editors think that it's pretty good.
