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 Knowledge Base 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. :)

Feel free to expand this heavily by ripping off (though preferably rewriting in our own words) Wikipedia's MOS and specifying things as thoroughly as they do - though keep in mind our rules are different, since we are not as purely encyclopedic as they are.

General Guidelines

Bias & Opinion

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.

Those who cannot write English well should use an automatic translator such as Google Translate to convert writing to English. Other users can then improve any issues with the translation.

Formatting

Sections

Do not use = Level 1 = sections.

Documentation

Documented code should be written in tables. The code should go on the left, and the description on the right.

Grammar

Perspective

Always write in third person perspective. This means you should not use personal pronouns such as I, me, and myself. Do not refer directly to the reader in articles, though guides may be exempt from this rule.

English variety

American and British English are both acceptable, however consistency within an article should be maintained. Articles originally written in American English should remain as such and not mixed with British English varieties of words. Any additions to an article should continue using the same English variety. Create redirects for alternative English title renderings to one main article. For example: Color redirects to the Colour article or vise versa. This will prevent searches using one English variety returning zero results.

However, considering how heavily we focus on Lego video games, and how they were all developed by British companies, might that affect our preferences?

Capitalization

Proper capitalization rules should always be followed in standard writing. Do Not Write Sentences Like This. nor leave sentences uncapitalized like this.

Names of vehicles and buildings should be capitalized on a case-by-case basis. However, the names of objects and creatures, unless using a proper name in their name, should generally not be capitalized. For instance, "rock monster" should usually not be written as "Rock Monster", despite most LEGO media writing it this way.

For now, brand names should be written with their stylized capitalization – LEGO instead of Lego, despite Wikipdia following different rules.

Code should be left in its original capitalization.

Italic type

Wikipedia:Italic type|Italic type]] (text like this) is produced by placing double apostrophes on either side of the content to be italicized ''like this''. 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}}.

Emphasis

Italicize emphasized words by using the HTML emphasis markup <em>...</em> or the template {{em|...}}. This allows it to be parsed and acted upon in customizable ways with style sheets, apps and text-to-speech screen readers.

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, but not major religious works.
• 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 uses

• Names of ships, e.g. LMS Explorer
• Taxonomic names written in Binomial nomenclature, e.g. Tyrannosaurus rex
• Mentioning words, characters, or strings of words up to one full sentence
• Mentioning foreign words and phrases

Vocabulary

Avoid using contractions whenever possible. If the contraction can't be expanded without sounding awkward, the sentence containing it should be rewritten to sound better.

Do not use slang, jargon, cursing, or any other form of unprofessional writing.

Use gender-neutral language when possible.

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".

Guidelines from the to do page

move all this stuff up into the general guidelines page?

• Modernization - "The wiki is meant to escape the traditional look of the old wiki and use better design and web standards." Not entirely sure what Cyrem meant by this, but I've been trying to just write out simple pages with images and such so far, without any of the usual bogged-down wiki infobox stuff, so whether this is good or not it should still be easy to fix any issues from here.
• IMPORTANT! We need definitive contributing guide for basic wiki editing and uploading!
• Generally, try to write articles with the intention of structuring the wiki into three separate pseudo-categories.
  • Themes - Everything about a theme, sets, characters, media, concept etc...
  • Video games - Everything about particular video games and what is in them. There "shouldn't" be overlap between Themes and Video games as Themes describe the Intellectual Property as a whole whereas VG detail a particular product. When two pages arise, e.g Characters of Theme, Characters of video game, these should be two pages: [Theme] Characters explains characters from a product perspective, appearances, advertising, marketed personality, sets etc., while [VG] Characters - Explains characters as they appear in the video game, purpose, function, interactions, graphics, appearances, variations etc.
    • I still don't understand the physical and game minifigure split, what is there to actually say about the physical minifigures without mentioning their backstory that deserves a page separate from the sets they appear in?
  • Modding - game mods, technical info about file formats, configuration, modding tutorials and modding tools. Also included Rock Raiders United-related info, though this will probably mostly fall under the RRU Knowledge Base pagename.
  • Material about canon story is kind of its own fourth pseudo-category, being divided between the Theme and Video Game sections depending on which end the story behind it more comes from. While writing, it'd probably be better to think of it as more of a Canon-Product split in writing styles - eg, the pages Hover Scout and 4910 Hover Scout.
• Rework and remake a lot of templates - the old wiki had a lot of archaic and ugly templates, new ones should be more simple and flow with existing design. I have not done a good job at this so far, and a number of infoboxes are kinda ugly - though most so far are "hey finish working on this" boxes
  • Need someone who knows a lot about wiki coding to help with this!
• Less repetitive linking - Some pages link to other pages on nearly every mention of a word (e.g Crystal), A word should only be linked to a page at most- a few times depending on the length of the page. The first mention should always be linked. Additional times should only be linked if there is a lot of text between each link or if it's crucial to something being explained, eg. a list in the middle of a page.