GoArch:Style guide

Grammar

Style

Consistent with the original developer's country of origin, American English is the preferred style of the Guild of Archivists. However, British English is also acceptable, so it should only be corrected when editing someone else to correct inconsistencies in style within an article.

Capitalization

In general, written text conforms to English capitalization rules. Page titles and section headers should be written in normal sentence case, capitalizing only the first word, proper nouns, and other formal identifiers.

Races, whose names are often synonymous with their Age of origin (such as the Pento), are capitalized. Species (such as the bahro) are not. Capitalization of group names is dependent upon the source material (Judges of Yahvo, Moiety, explorers). In cases where the source material is inconsistent, leave the word uncapitalized.

Guilds are always capitalized when referred to by name ("Guild of Archivists"). When the specific guild's name is omitted, the word "guild" is not capitalized.

For D'ni proper names with apostrophes in them, only the first letter is capitalized. e.g. Ae'gura and A'gaeris instead of Ae'Gura and A'Gaeris.

Formal identifiers

A formal identifier can be one of two things:

• a proper noun used to label a specific person, place, or thing, or
• a common noun whose meaning is substantially altered in the context of its use when describing a foreign artifact.

For example, Atrus, Riven, and Ferry Terminal are all proper nouns. For objects such as Nexus terminal, the name of the Age is capitalized, but the object itself is not. The word "book" is not capitalized when referring to a regular book, but a D'ni Book is (specifically, Book, Linking Book, Descriptive Book). Similar examples include Art, Age, Tablet, and Slate.

Like guilds, the words "journey" and "quest" should only be capitalized when a specific instance is being described. e.g. Yeesha's first Journey is one of several journeys which explorers are asked to undertake.

Punctuation

Hyphens and dashes

• A hyphen links an adjective to a word it modifies, e.g. Ae'gura was the capital of the once-great D'ni empire.
• An em-dash (— or —) separates a phrase from the main sentence, e.g. Atrus—not to be confused with his grandfather of the same name—is….
• An en-dash (– or –) to specify ranges, e.g. 10–20.

Note that when using a dash, the spaces between it and the surrounding words are omitted.

Parentheses

Parenthetical statements should be avoided where possible. If an aside is needed in the middle of a sentence, separate it using an em-dash (—) as outlined above.

Periods and quotation marks

When a quotation ends in the middle of a sentence, it should terminate in a comma. e.g. Therefore, "the ending has not yet been written," as Atrus once said.

If a quotation ends a sentence, the period should be within the quotation marks. e.g. "As Atrus once said, "the ending has not yet been written."

If a word or phrase is wrapped in quotation marks at the end of a sentence, the period should be outside the quotation marks. e.g. This is what the D'ni called a "Linking Book".

Quotation marks should never be used for emphasis. Use italic or bold text for this purpose.

Block quotes

Quotations in <blockquote> do not need to be surrounded by quotation marks.

Numbers

Numbers less than or equal to ten should generally be spelled out (i.e. "four" instead of "4") when used as part of a sentence. Larger numbers may be written numerically (525,600), and numbers that are part of a data set such as KI coordinates or a date should always be written so.

Linking

In general, people, places, and other terms in need of explanation should be linked on their first use. For subject matters outside the D'ni universe, interwiki links to Wikipedia or another relevant wiki is preferred to duplicating the content here. See Help:Editing for more information on creating links.

Linking to a page that does not exist will create a redlink, e.g. Atrus's bad parenting. Redlinks are not automatically bad, and can in fact be a valuable tool in identifying the areas in which the wiki is lacking. Leaving something unlinked just so as to avoid a redlink is to be discouraged, as when the article in question is finally created it becomes a pain to track down where all the links should have been before. Linking is a fundamental part of any wiki, and redlinks can some times be just as important as blue ones. That said, in many cases, such as the example above, such an article would not be within the scope of the wiki project and should not have been linked to begin with. Deciding whether something should be linked or not is usually left to the discretion of the editor.

Generally, a link should appear only once in an article, or once per section for longer articles. However, if helpful for readers, links may be repeated in infoboxes, tables, and image captions. Unnecessarily frequent linking is known as "overlinking" and is discouraged.

Linking dates

The Archive does not adhere to Wikipedia's policy of not linking dates in articles. Dates should be linked on first use, as with any other linked term. Date links must include the era, e.g. 625 DE.

Redirects

When linking to a page, do not link to a redirect, simply link to the redirect destination. You may set the link to display with the name of the redirect via the format link-pipe-display name, e.g. [[GoArch:General disclaimer|GoArch:Copyrights]].

Images

See also: Help:Uploading images

Icons

If you need to use an icon from the D'ni universe, check the Dnidings namespace for a list of available glyphs that can be embedded in your article.

References

See also: GoArch:References

Any information which cannot be readily verified in-game or from the official website may be given a reference. See GoArch:References for details on formatting and syntax.

Sort order

In general, lists and tables should be sorted in alphabetical order, unless some other sorting method is more appropriate.

Quotations

Text taken directly from in-game or other sources is transcribed verbatim. Any errors in spelling, punctuation or grammar remain unchanged and are tagged with {{sic|[correction]}} after the error (where [correction] is how it should be displayed).

When providing flavor quotes and in-game descriptions for a page, {{Quote|<source>|<text>}} is used. A page whose only purpose is to host transcribed information is tagged with a template from the Official source templates category. For example, see Ahlsendar.

Prose written by wiki contributors is preferred to quotations because it provides context and flow which most quotes do not provide.

Stubs

A stub is an article that has missing or incomplete information — this has nothing to do with length: short articles are not necessarily stubs and long articles are not necessarily complete. When possible, add missing information yourself instead of using {{stub}}.

• New articles don't need the tag, since people will be updating them.
• Use the stub when an article appears substantially complete, but isn't.

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Content in this section is based on the help documents for Wikipedia and the Guild Wars 2 Wiki. In accordance with the Guild Wars 2 Wiki's licensing terms, the material on this page is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) 1.2.