Style guide
Overview
The default style guide for the Empire wiki is to use the guide provided for Wikipedia. Wikipedia has been around for a very long time and the style guide conventions that exist there have a lot of thought put into them designed to keep a wiki clean and make it easy to extend.
Obviously the wikipedia style guide is very long and relatively few contributors are going to want to wade through it. So we have reproduced some of the most important guidelines here, along with some additional guidelines that apply to the Empire wiki.
Page Titles
Use Lowercase, except for Proper Names
Titles are written in sentence case. The initial letter of a title is almost always capitalized by default; otherwise, words are not capitalized unless they would be so in running text. When this is done, the title is simple to link to in other articles. Note that the capitalization of the initial letter is ignored in links.
Use the Singular Form
Article titles are generally singular in form, e.g. Horse, not Horses. Exceptions include nouns that are always in a plural form in English (e.g. scissors or trousers) and the names of classes of objects (e.g. Arabic numerals or Bantu languages).
Avoid Definite and Indefinite Articles
Do not place definite or indefinite articles (the, a, and an) at the beginning of titles unless they are part of a proper name (e.g. The League) or otherwise change the meaning (e.g. The Throne). They are noise words that needlessly lengthen article titles, and interfere with sorting and searching.
Section Titles
Section Titles should be written in Title Case
We have deviated from the wikipedia guidelines and adopted title case, not sentence case for section titles. While it makes links slightly harder, it looks easier on the eye on the screen.
Capitalization
- Only capitalize proper nouns
- In-character nouns should be capitalized if they would be proper nouns in-character
- Game terms and other jargon are not proper nouns
In Empire we only capitalize proper nouns - we don't capitalize words just because they are unusual or game terms - as is common in the roleplaying industry. When a noun is made up or unusual in some way, we try to look at an equivalent in the real world. Examples:
- The Imperial Conclave is capitalized - because it's a proper noun - like the Houses of Parliament or Windsor castle.
- A coven is not capitalized - in the same way you wouldn't capitalize "pack of cards" in the real world. Similar words like realm and regio and ritual are not capitalized. Eternal is incorrectly capitalized in many places - it should be lower case.
- The race orc is not capitalized, nor is lineage, in the same way we don't capitalize fox, human, or duck.
- Imperial Orc is fully capitalized because it is a nationality - like British or French. Imperial is always capitalized because it refers to things of a specific empire. So the citizens of the Empire are Imperial citizens.
- You don't capitalize senator or general or archmage - like you don't capitalize general or politician or fireman. Obviously Bob the Builder is capitalized so General Dave is capitalized. You wouldn't capitalize empress, but you would capitalize Empress Rachilde.
Category Names
- Category names should be plural if the articles in the category are a set of items in that category
- Category names should be singular if the articles in the category are set of articles about the category
A category where each article is an example of the category should be plural - rituals, magic items, spells. A category where each article is an article of content about the category should be singular - The League, The Imperial Conclave, Religion.
Grammar
- Please use the Oxford comma
The Oxford comma is a comma placed immediately before the coordinating conjunction (usually and, or, or nor) in a series of three or more terms. For example, a list of three countries should be punctuated either as "France, Italy, and Spain", not as "France, Italy and Spain".