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

Shortcut

AW:MOS/TITLE

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.