Alathra Wiki:Manual of Style

This Manual of Style (MoS or MOS) is the style manual for all Alathra Wiki articles. It establishes general guidelines for creating and maintaining articles using straightforward, concise, easily understood language and structuring articles with consistent, reader-friendly layouts and formatting.

New content added to the manual should directly address a constantly recurring style issue.

Article titles, sections, headings

Article titles

A title of an article should be a recognizable name or description of the topic that is short, precise and consistent with other titles of similar articles. For formatting guidance, note the following:

• Capitalize the initial letter, but otherwise follow sentence case (Guldhirian conquest of the Rot Wuds), not title case (Guldhirian Conquest Of The Rot Wuds), except when capitalization would be generally accepted in writing.
• To italicize titles of books, music, art or other creative work, place the title into a {{DISPLAYTITLE}} template at the top of the page, enclosed in double apostrophes, like so: {{DISPLAYTITLE: ''Travels and Tales''}}
• Do not use grammatical articles (a, an, or the) as the first word (Commonwealth of Blackthorn, not The Commonwealth of Blackthorn), unless it's a title of a work (The Kutharan Myth of Creation).
• Do not include phrases that indicate an unfinished article in the title, for example WIP or placeholder.
• Do not use emoticons, ambiguous unicode characters or unnecessary spaces (Vikingr Battle Axe, not ¤ Víkingr Battle Axe ¤), as they make the page harder to search for. Titles with non-latin characters should be romanized, but can be used in their original writing in the article itself.
• When specifying the article type for clarity, use lower case (Bal Duran (town), not Bal Duran (Town)).

Section headings

Section headings should generally follow the guidance for article titles (listed above), and should be presented in sentence case (Course of the war), not title case (Course Of The War). The article shouldn't begin with a section heading.

For consistent style, section headings should:

• Be nested properly (the subheading of heading level 2 is heading level 3, etc.)
• Not redundantly refer back to the article subject, e.g. (Early life, not Melevor's early life or His early life).
• Not be numbered or lettered.

Dates and time

Calendars

Alathrans use multiple different calendars to record time. Dates should always be formatted to clearly indicate which calendar is being used. For specific details about formatting, check for the calendar's dedicated article. In addition to real time, the commonly used calendars are:

• Lore calendar (not denoted)
• Crops' calendar (denoted by AC and BC)
• Valtaran calendar (denoted by ACW and BCW)

Dates

Full dates in real time are formatted 11 June 2023 or June 11, 2023; or where the year is omitted, use 11 June or June 11. Only omit years to avoid repetition, such as when a year is already established in a single paragraph. For month and year, write June 2023, with no comma.

When formatting a date in a different calendar, never omit its required denotation (June 11, 4 AC, not June 11, 4).

The dates in the text of any article should remain consistent throughout (day-first or month-first), except for dates in quotations and titles, which are always left as-is.

Seasons

Ambiguous references to seasons should generally be avoided. On Earth, the seasons differ between the northern and southern hemispheres; in Alathra, dating of seasons always depends on the calendar being used. It is recommended to only use the names of seasons when a more precise date is unknown, in which case they always need to be accompanied by their respective year in real time, e.g. summer of 2022.

Years and longer periods

• Do not use the year before the digits (2022, not the year 2022), unless the meaning would otherwise be unclear.
• Decades are written in the format 2020s, with no apostrophe.

Current

Terms such as "current", "now" and "recent" should be avoided. What is current today may not be tomorrow; situations change over time. Instead use date- and time-specific text.

Incorrect: He is the current king of ... Correct: As of June 2023, he is the king of ...

Main article content

The main text of an article should remain factual and provide a neutral and unaugmented viewpoint, while always remaining within the scope of its given topic. Related information that is not actually about the topic itself should be made into a separate article and then linked using a See also section or with a {{main}} template.

Character

The Alathra Wiki project, whether intended or not, is a form of roleplay. The wiki is used to chronicle information about various lore, events, places and people that would otherwise remain unknown to a large group of the community. For that reason, when creating articles, try to envision how Alathra would be documented if its characters had access to such a site as Wikipedia. Then write the article through your character, but with regards to the following:

• Do not break character or insert fourth wall breaks inside the text of the actual article. Instead, direct out-of-character (OOC) messages to the article's Discussion page or to the wiki discussion Discord channel.
• Do not use placeholder phrases, e.g. WIP or placeholder in text. For best practice, consider that after every edit, the article should look complete, even if there is not much information presented.
• Do not write any forms of dialogue into an article. Records of lore that contain conversation should be posted to the roleplay Discord channel.