RRU Knowledge Base:Guidelines

This article is an unfinished work in progress or contains transferred information that needs to be rewritten or reformatted to fit our standards. Please excuse the mess and do not mark for deletion.

written by le717, will edit and expand

Any good programmer will tell you that one of the best things you can do for yourself and others is to have a consistent, nicely formatting code style to abide by. In the same manner, a wiki should be written using consistent formatting and alike writing style, so as it would appear as if it has been written by a single author.

For the rest of this article, I will be taking you through some of the RRU Wiki writing guidelines. These guidelines are in place to improve your writing and the Wiki as a whole, not hinder it. Some of these guidelines should be kept at all times, while others are strongly recommended. This difference will be noted when applicable. :)

General Guidelines

• Always write in third person perspective. This means you should not use personal pronouns such as I, me, and myself.
• Be objective when writing. Do not include person preference, opinion, or bias when writing. If you disagree about something on a page, use its Talk Page to discuss and debate it. Do not start an edit war by persistently adding your opinion to the page. Opinions are allowed on your user profile, however.
• Write in American English and follow proper spelling and grammar rules at all times. Although the RRU Wiki is an international Wiki, this is an English speaking Wiki and most of the user base is from America. If you cannot write in English well, use an automatic translator such as Google Translate to convert your writing to English. Chances are someone else more fluent in English will pick it up and help improve it. :)
• Do not use contractions, slang, jargon, or any form of swearing or cursing. Ever. This sort of language is both unprofessional and frowned upon, and makes the entire page look bad. Further more, we strive to be a child-friendly Wiki, and inappropriate language is neither tolerated nor acceptable.

Grammar

Capitalization

Proper capitalization rules should always be followed in standard writing.

• Do Not Write Like This. This Creates An Awkwardly Written Sentence.

Italics

Text can be italicized by placing double apostrophes on either side of the word or words that need to be italicized like ''this'', which results in this. If a word is italicized for emphasis <em>emphasis tags</em> could be used instead, which apparently allows user style sheets to render the text in a custom way.

If the title of an article is or contains a name or phrase that should be italicized, place {{Italic title}} at the top of the page to display the article's title in italics. If only part of the article's title needs to be italicized, add the article's exact title as a parameter, placing double apostrophes around the italicized part: {{Italic title|''Italicized part'' and non-italicized part}}.

Titles of major works

The titles of major works should always be italicized. This includes:

• Audio albums
• Books, multi-volume works (e.g. encyclopedia sets), and booklets
• Comic books, comic strips, graphic novels and manga
• Non-generic names of major independent compositions
• Court case names, but not case citation or law report details included with the case name
• Named exhibitions (artistic, historical, scientific, educational, cultural, literary, etc. – generally hosted by, or part of, an existing institution such as a museum or gallery), but not large-scale exhibition events or individual exhibits
• Films (including short films) and documentaries
• Paintings, sculptures and other works of visual art with a title rather than a name

Periodicals (newspapers, journals, magazines)

• Plays (including published screenplays and teleplays)
• Long or epic poems
• Officially named series of major works
• Syndicated columns and other features republished regularly by others
• Television and radio programs, specials, shows, series and serials
• Video games (but not other software)

Other names

• Names of ships, e.g. LMS Explorer
• Taxonomic names written in Binomial nomenclature, e.g. Tyrannosaurus rex

Files

• Use the PNG image format when possible. PNG images are generally of much quality than JPG images.
• If a replaceable screenshot is in JPG format or in low quality, please replace it with a lossless high-quality screenshot.

Mods

• When uploading images related to your mod, please prefix them with the name of your mod to avoid using common file names. For example, instead of name my file Loading.jpg, which is rather generic and may be overwritten easily, I would name it le717sModLoadingScreen.jpg, assuming the name of my mod is "le717's Mod".