User:Aeleas/Manual of Style

From WoWWiki

Some portions of Wikipedia's Manual of Style for consideration here. A work in progress.

Contents 1 Article layout 1.1 See also 1.2 Lead section 1.3 Section headings 2 Capitalization 3 Titles of works 4 Quotations

Article layout

See also

A "see also" line is sometimes put at the beginning of an article, to link to an article about another meaning of the word, or in the case of a link that many readers are likely to follow instead of reading the article. The line should be italicized and indented using templates.

Lead section

Unless an article is very short, it should start with an introductory lead section, before the first subheading. The lead should not be explicitly entitled == Introduction == or any equivalent header. The table of contents, if displayed, appears after the lead section and before the first subheading.

The lead should be capable of standing alone as a concise overview of the article, establishing context, and explaining why the subject is interesting or notable. It should be between one or two paragraphs long, and should be written in a clear and accessible style so that the reader is encouraged to read the rest of the article.

If possible, make the title the subject of the first sentence of the article. For example, write "King Terenas Menethil II was the king of Lordaeron during and after the Second War."

The first time the article mentions the title, put it in bold using three apostrophes — '''article title''' produces article title. Avoid other uses of bold in the first sentence, except for alternative titles of an article; for example, Blood elf:

The blood elves, or sin'dorei, are a race comprised of former high elves...

Follow the normal rules for italics in choosing whether to put part or all of the title in italics. This will mainly apply to the titles of books and games:

The Last Druid is a novel in the War of the Ancients trilogy.

Do not put links in the bold reiteration of the title in the article's lead sentence. For example, avoid "The night elves are an ancient race..."

Section headings

1. Use the == (two equal signs) style markup for headings.
2. Do not use wikilinks in subject headings.
3. Capitalize the first letter only of the first word and of any proper nouns in a heading, and leave all of the other letters in lowercase. Use "Founding and history", not "Founding and History".
4. Avoid special characters in headings, such as an ampersand (&), a plus sign (+), curly braces ({}), or square braces ([]). In place of the ampersand, use the word and unless the ampersand is part of a formal name.
5. Keep the heading short.
6. Avoid unnecessary words or redundancy in headings: avoid a, an, and the, pronouns, repeating the article title, and so on.
7. Do not give identical titles to different sections.

Capitalization

Titles such as lord, king, or archdruid start with a capital letter when used as a title (followed by a name): "King Arthas", not "king Arthas". When used generically, they should be in lower case: "Furion is a powerful archdruid." The correct formal name of an office is treated as a proper noun. Hence: "Anduin is the current King of Stormwind."

Titles of works

Italics are used for the titles of works, such as books and games. The titles of articles, chapters, and other short works are not italicized but are enclosed in double quotation marks.

For example, italicize The Last Guardian and World of Warcraft, and use quotes for "Arathor and the Troll Wars".

Quotations

Format a long quote (over four lines) as a block quotation, which will be indented from both margins. Do not enclose the block quote in quotation marks. To format a block quotation, do not use the wiki indentation mark : — instead, use the HTML <blockquote> element.