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A style guide or style manual is a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization or field. The implementation of a style guide provides uniformity in style and formatting of a document.
A set of standards for a specific organization is often known as "house style". Style guides are common for general and specialized use, for the general reading and writing audience, and for students and scholars of various academic disciplines, medicine, journalism, the law, government, business, and industry.
Organizations advocating for social minorities sometimes establish what they believe to be fair and correct language treatment of their audiences.
Some style guides focus on graphic design, focusing on such topics as typography and white space. Web site style guides cover a publication's visual and technical aspects, along with text.
Many style guides are revised periodically to accommodate changes in conventions and usage. For example, the stylebook of the Associated Press is updated annually.
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Publishers' style guides establish house rules for language use, such as spelling, italics and punctuation; their major purpose is consistency. They are rulebooks for writers, ensuring consistent language. Authors are asked or required to use a style guide in preparing their work for publication; copy editors are charged with enforcing the publishing house's style.
Academic organization and university style guides are rigorous about documentation formatting style for citations and bibliographies used for preparing term papers for course credit and manuscripts for publication. Professional scholars are advised to follow the style guides of organizations in their disciplines when they submit articles and books to academic journals and academic book publishers in those disciplines for consideration of publication. Once they have accepted work for publication, publishers provide authors with their own guidelines and specifications, which may differ from those required for submission, and editors may assist authors in preparing their work for press.
Indexing of the published work, which can be a tedious task, can be done by the author, by a professional editorial indexer, or by computer software. If done by the author or close collaborators of the author who are not professional indexers, the work is called "self-indexed".
Some organizations, other than the aforementioned ones, produce style guides for either internal or external use. For example, communications and public relations departments of business and nonprofit organizations have style guides for their publications (newsletters, news releases, web sites). Organizations advocating for social minorities sometimes establish what they believe to be fair and correct language treatment of their audiences.
Many publications (notably newspapers) use graphic design style guides to demonstrate the preferred layout and formatting of a published page. They often are extremely detailed in specifying, for example, which fonts and colors to use. Such guides allow a large design team to produce visually consistent work for the organization.
Several basic style guides for technical and scientific communication have been defined by international standards organizations. These are often used as elements of and refined in more specialized style guides that are specific to a subject, region or organization. One example is ISO 215 — Presentation of contributions to periodicals & other serials.
In the United States, most nonjournalism writing follows the Chicago Manual of Style,[1] while most newspapers base their style on the Associated Press Stylebook. A classic style guide for the general public is The Elements of Style.
Redirecting to Style guide
Our Manual of style is a collection of rules of thumb and guidelines for giving Wikitravel a consistent look and feel. Most of these rules have exceptions, but to put together a good reference work collaboratively, it's best to follow the rules unless they're quite inappropriate for a particular situation.
The Manual is broken up into different pages so that this one doesn't get overloaded with extraneous text. It makes it easier to find and update individual rules or concepts if they're on their own pages. Finally, it's easier for smarty-pantses to link to the particular rule being broken from talk pages for articles.
If all this stuff makes your head swim, and you don't want to bother with it, by all means plunge forward and just start sharing your knowledge. Other Wikitravellers will come through and bring your contributions more in line with the style guide.
If you have a question about the specifics of the Manual, or want to see it changed/amended/clarified, use the talk page for the section in question. A list of issues currently being discussed can be found here.
This section of the Manual is for rules about the structure of Wikitravel as a whole.
These rules are about laying out individual articles. That is, they describe how we take raw information and put it in a format that's easily usable by travelers.
Article layout:
Formatting content:
Links:
Listings:
This set of rules describes how to write words, sentences, and paragraphs.
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Stop!
If you visit this page, you are probably not aware of Wikibooks Naming policy. Every single book chapter has to contain the full name of the book it belongs to. Create the manual of style for your book on page: yourBookName/Manual of Style. Examples how to name pages:
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This page is to help users become familiar with page creation and style.
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As Wikia Gaming we uphold the highest possible quality of writing we can achieve. As such take these things into consideration:
Whenever a game title appears in regular text, it should be italicized. On the wiki, simply place two apostrophes on each side of the game name to accomplish this.
''Game Title''
If the game's title is being linked, put the apostrophes *outside* the brackets, as such.
''[[Game Title]]''
Note that if you using the game title as a parameter to a template, such as this example:
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{{Navigation | name = Juiced}}
You must not italicize the title, as it will cause the resulting link to go to a non-existent page.
This section will lead you through creating your first game information page.
First, add an infobox. Go to the Infobox template and copy and paste the section where it says "Copy and paste". Add this to the top of your new page. The infobox template page contains detailed descriptions of each field; fill in as much information as you can.
Once you have done this, you can later use the links on the bottom of the infobox if you have codes, walkthroughs, credits, or soundtrack information. Those should be used where possible; the main articles are intended for more encyclopedic information, such as descriptions of the gameplay, history of the development, controversies surrounding the game, and the like, not for GameFAQs type information.
When the infobox is added and you fill in the release date(s), you should link the date as follows. Assume an example date of November 8, 2005. The text should be linked as such:
[[November 8]], [[2005]]
This is for two reasons. First, the wiki software can automatically rearrange linked dates so that they appear as a user wishes. (Europeans usually prefer to see 8 November instead of November 8, for example.) Second, it will create a link to the page for that month and day, and that year, where readers can find out what else occurred at those times.
If the date page already exists, such as November 8, please add your new game to the list under the appropriate year; let's assume we are talking about the game Gun, which released on November 8, 2005. So on the page for November 8, we would add 2005 as a list item, and Gun as a sub-list item, as such:
*2005 **''[[Gun]]'' for the [[Nintendo GameCube|GameCube]], [[PlayStation 2]], and the [[Xbox]] in [[North America]]
If a game has been assigned a rating by a content rating body, it should be included in the infobox. Please make sure that it follows the standard links, so that all rating links are uniform and go to the same place.
You can see all of the ratings links in one place at the gamerate template. For example, to link to an ESRB rating of E for Everyone, your link should be as follows.
[[ESRB: E]]
Similarly, to link to a PEGI rating of 12+, the link should appear like so:
[[PEGI: 12+]]
You can find a complete list of the links for various ratings at Content rating links.
After the infobox, briefly describe the game, its' significant aspects, primary release dates, developer, publisher, and major systems for which it was released. Below this, go into more detail with sections. Some section ideas to consider:
Encyclopedia Gamia organizes codes, walkthroughs, credits, and soundtrack information as sub-pages. For example, to find the soundtrack listing for Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights, you would go to Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights/soundtrack. When you add an infobox to a page, you will see links at the bottom of it for these four sub-pages. Click on one to start the page. See Help:Credits for credits details
Once you are editing the sub-page, the first thing to do is add navigation. Copy the template below and paste it at the top of the new page:
{{Navigation| name = GameName}}
Replace "GameName" with the title of the game. In the example above, it would be Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights. (As noted above, this is one of the places where you must not italicize the game name.)
You can then proceed to add information to the page.
Because codes can vary from system to system use the highest header function (= Atari =) to separate them. Note that this header is never used on base pages, only on subpages Codes and Walkthrough.
Wikia Gaming "testing cheats" protocol coming soon.
We want to collect false cheats under a === False Cheats === section so that the player does not attempt cheats that do not work.
Like the codes use = Atari = to separate game consoles, then == Easy == for difficulty, === Pong Level 1 === for levels, and ==== First Serve ==== for different sections of that level if necessary. The text at the very top of the page must apply to every walkthrough for each guide and each difficulty level. The text under the console must apply to all difficulty levels. The writer may sign his/her name in the introduction of whichever walkthrough he/she is writing. For instance, if the writer wrote the every single
In walkthroughs it is acceptable to use the personal pronoun "you", but usually not "I". This is due to the fact that the walkthrough is speaking to the player, not you (the writer) speaking to the player. The only exception is when suggesting things to the player if the player has multiple options.
At the bottom of walkthoughs, we suggest placing a disclaimer, on walkthroughs more than codes because one game might have many walkthoughs, for which have a copyright. Also place all users' names who contributed information (not typos, or placing {{Navigation}} on the page) below the disclaimer on a list.
If the game is part of a series, there may be a series template which can be added to easily show links to other games from that series. For example, if your new article was about SSX Tricky, you could add the Ssx template like so:
{{Ssx}}
You can find all of the series for which we have templates listed at Useful Templates (Games). Note that when adding a template, it will appear exactly where you place it within the page. Typically series templates go at the bottom of a page, above any category tags, but below the last section.
Next, you should categorize your article. Possibly categories include genre(s), system(s) on which the game appears, and a series category (if the game is part of a series). (Before adding a series category, if you have added a series template, make sure that it does not include a category as part of it. If it does, you do not need to add a series category.)
To categorize an article, simply add the following:
[[Category:Target Category]]
Replace the words "Target Category" with the intended category. An example is:
[[Category:PlayStation games]]
This will make the bottom of a page have a status bar which links multiple pages in the same category together. You can go to the PlayStation games category to see everything in that category. More than one category can be added to a page.
Please note that sentence case is preferred for category names on this wiki, as this makes them somewhat easier to type. Some examples:
Currently, not all categories adhere to this standard. Efforts to correct this are ongoing.
If you're writing out the entire plot for a game, and it's really long, it's best to make it a new article, and have a short summary in it's place on the game's title page. Then, link to the new article at the top. For examples, compare Breath of Fire II's story section as it links to Breath of Fire II Storyline. Wikipedia does this quite often too, particularly for linking articles on a nation with articles on their history. It should look like this in the code:
:''Main Article: [[Game Title Storyline]]'' Game Title takes place in 1000 AD, where it follows the path the brave, shining knight named Bardalon! He awakes in his humble, peaceful kingdom under attack by aliens from the planet Quarshk. With his legendary sword, The Pain-Giver, Bardalon ventures out into strange lands to collect the 9 magic gems that will give him the power to stop evil, once and for all!
It should be noted that any section that requires excessive scrolling could probably be made into its' own page.
The definition of a stub is not set in stone, but if a page contains minimal actual information, it is probably a stub. It is primarily used to refer to incomplete articles.
If your article is a stub, place the following template on it:
{{stub}}
This adds the article to the Stub category and places a note on it that it is an incomplete article. There are also stub templates that cover specific game series; see Game stub templates for those.
Disambiguation allows a common word to direct the reader to several different topics that share the same name. For example, see FPS. In that case, the main article is a disambiguation article, linking to other pages. Another example is Zelda, where the main article is about the character Zelda, but there is a notice at the top linking to a disambiguation page where other uses of the word are noted.
The template for a disambiguation notice is
{{disambig}}
It should be placed at the bottom of a disambiguation page, after the clarified links.
If you use a copyrighted image or other resource, but believe it to fall under fair use (see link for details), use the following template:
{{fairuse}}
It should be placed near the bottom of the page, above a stub template and any categories.
Place the Characterbox template at the top of the page and fill out as much information as you can. Then proceed to write an article with additional information about the character. See Mario for an example of a good character page.
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