Manual of Style

2320ad Wiki Manual of style For an introduction to Wiki editing, please see the Introduction to editing page on wikia.

For information on the most basic writing techniques and styles, which are used here, see Wikipedia's Manual of Style.

Naming articles
There are some rules regarding how articles on the 2320ad wiki should be named.


 * Article names should be in singular form, not plural.


 * The titles of articles about individual people should be the name by which the person was most commonly known in the the 2320ad universe, with later names preferred to earlier names, and full names preferred to partial names or nicknames. Titles, such as military ranks or titles of nobility, should be omitted. Articles titles about people should be in the form of "Family Name, Personal Name(s)".


 * Unless the name of the article contains a proper noun, only the first word should be capitalised.


 * Articles about a world (like Aurore, or Inferno) should have the text "(world)" appended to their article title. This is so we can distingush between (for example) the Botany Bay (Colony), Botany Bay (World), and Botany Bay the geographical feature.

Categorising articles

 * Ensure that you correctly categorise your article with one or more categories, using either one of the library templates or  templates or ... tags.
 * All information that is readily available to players should be included in either the canon or non-canon categories as well as the library category. These articles should be written from an in game perspective.
 * If you are unsure what categories to use check the categories page and see what types of articles are included in relevant sounding categories.

Headings
Use the  (heading) markup for headings, not the   (bold) markup. Example:



which produces:


 * This is a heading 

If you mark headings this way, a table of contents is automatically generated from the headings in an article. Sections can be automatically numbered for users with that preference set and words within properly marked headings are given greater weight in searches. Headings also help readers by breaking up the text and outlining the article.


 * Capitalise the first letter only of the first word and of any proper nouns in a heading, and leave all of the other letters in lower case.
 * Avoid links within headings.
 * Avoid overuse of sub-headings.

Links
External links can be made to wikipedia or other wikias (as they are all part of the same development and not likely to vanish). Links to less than common terms, or articles on real-world technologies would be appropriate. Links to any other web site should normally be in a section labelled as such. They are written like this Far Future 2300AD which results in Far Future 2300AD, although links to other wikis and to Wikipedia look like internal links.

Internal links should be made to any 2320ad-specific term (e.g. Stutterwarp Drive gives Stutterwarp Drive) this should include races, places, historical events, people, etc. Link to all current articles, and everything that you think should be an article. This includes all references to authors, elements, books, magazines, high technology, even if they don't exist yet as we can use the most wanted list to determine articles to research. Links should be made once on the page for each term, the first time the term is used. (e.g. Pentapod should be linked the first time it is used, and not linked afterwards).

Links to worlds should use the World template. This gives a consistent look and feel (and link standard) for all the world articles.

Templates
We have developed a number of templates for the site which fall into several categories. These can all be seen on the Template List page.

Wikipedia template is used when the majority of the text is copied from wikipedia, if the article is significantly different (more comprehensive) than a similar article about 2300/2320AD on Wikipedia, please add the 2320adwiki template to wikipedia.

The templates: Stub, Incomplete, Detail, Complete, Language, Source and Infoboxneeded are to be used to signify that the article has issues, and needs to be addressed. Obviously it is preferable to fix the issue, but labeling it will allow others to identify the articles that need work easily.

There are a number of infobox templates that put a box with information at the side of the page (as yet we do not have bottom boxes linking similar pages as in wikipedia. Articles that fit the type should use these templates, which include: Book, (Colony), (Planet), Ships, (Vehicles), (Weapons), Race, VIP, and Date.

There are templates to expand text and possibly reference one or more other pages. The Colony and World for example will reference the Colony, World and Star and present the format for world references in a common format. Others include TDref and JTASref to make reference to articles for those publications (others will likely follow), and short forms like GDW which refer to their longer named pages.

Finally there are library templates. Each article in the library section should use either the LE (Cannon) or the LEN (non-cannon) template. This no longer needs the first letter of the article as a category.

Dictionary entries
In addition to the library entries, the 2320ad wiki contains a dictionary of terms specific to the 2320ad universe and translations of words from the numerous alien languages. The 2320ad wiki follows the Wiktionary's manual of style for entry layout. The fundamental elements of an article:
 * 1) a word’s language (as a level 2 heading),
 * 2) its part of speech or "type" (as a level 3 heading),
 * 3) the inflection word itself, including pluralisation for nouns, comparatives for adjectives  and the verb tenses,
 * 4) a definition (preceded by "#", which causes automatic numbering), and,
 * 5) links in the definition for key words

The entry layout article goes into more depth about additional information to be included in each dictionary entry.

Colony and World Articles
These are articles about a colony in a system.

As stated above, the article should be the name of the world followed by the text " (colony)" or " (world)". This is to distinguish the colony articles from astrographic features with the same name. Also many of the templates assume this text is part of the article name.

The article must include the   or    template with the full name and location of the colony or world.