Manual of style

This manual of style is intended to help you write good articles, that will make the IHW good itself. It is still in its first stage, but it should nevertheless give you a good idea of how to write.
==How to write a biography==
Biographies should be written this way:
* An introduction to begin with, featuring the person's name in bold letters as the first words of the article. The intro should give a brief overview of who the person is/was, where and when he was born and what he did.
:Example: Dieter Kalt (b. June 26th 1974 in Klagenfurt, Austria) is a professional Austrian left winger who plays in the Erste Bank Eishockey Liga for EC Salzburg.
:The name of the player can have diacritics if his name in his native language has any; however, names of players who come from countries using alphabets different from the Latin one (Russia, Japan, China, Korea, etc.) require the name to be spelled in the Latin alphabet, with, in parentheses and in italics (except maybe for Japanese, Korean and Chinese, languages containing characters that may become impossible to read when written in italics and/or bold letters), his name written in his native language.
:Example: Yutaka Fukufuji (in Japanese: 福藤 豊, Fukufuji Yutaka) (b. September 17th 1982 in Kushiro, Hokkaido, Japan) is a professional goaltender who plays in the National Hockey League for the Los Angeles Kings.
:Players who have diacritics in their name should have an article redirecting to them that contains no diacritics, so people who don't have the correct letters on their keyboards can nevertheless find the page should they search for it.
:Example:Marek Zidlicky redirects to Marek Židlický.
* A career overview. Depending on the amount of information available, it can be as short as a few lines or as long as... well, as long as it can be. Very long articles however should be separated in subsections (themselves separated in paragraphs) to make reading easier and help people easily find sections containing information they might be more interested in.
** Said overview should include a career statistics section. Please see Manual of style/Career statistics for all the information about this section.
* A See also section, containing links to other articles within IHW that are related to the player in question. This section is not mandatory, and should only be included should there be an article somewhere providing some additional information on the player/person. If that link is already in the biography article, there's no need to create a See also section to repeat it.
:Example: It might be a nice idea to add a See also section to Wayne Gretzky's article linking to the List of all-time NHL leaders, as he is in many of the lists there.
* An External links section, with links to pages outside IHW. A link to a page giving a player's career stats is an excellent addition (use Template:Hockeydb if the player has a page at hockeydb.com; a similar template, Template:Eurohockey exists for european players who have a page on eurohockey.net).
* Categories, to classify the person correctly. Typical categories for a player are:
** Nationality (e.g. :Category:Canadian hockey players, :Category:Finnish hockey players and so on for players; :Category:Canadian hockey coaches and so on for coaches, etc.)
** Teams played/coached (e.g. :Category:Montreal Canadiens player, :Category:Tappara Tampere player, :Category:Member of the Swedish National Team; :Category:New York Rangers coach; :Category:Finnish National Team coach). Note that the words player and coach are plural in the nationality categories, but singular in the team ones. 
** Year of birth (e.g. :Category:Born in 1974)
** Year of death, if it applies (e.g. :Category:Dead in 2006)
** Year of retirement, if it applies (e.g. :Category:Retired in 2008)
:There is no limit to the number of categories a page can have; as long as they apply to the player, it's perfectly correct to add them. (Then check that each category is in at least one category itself so they aren't dead red links.)
==How to write an article about a club, a team or a league==
It is very similar to how to write a biography.
* Introduction:
:Blues Espoo (founded in Espoo, Finland, on February 1984 as Kiekko Espoo) is a professional ice hockey club of the SM-Liiga.
:The introduction should include the name of the home rink, the number of championships won and the years and the year it folded, if it applies.
* A team history:
:The club history, from the founding to today, or to the day the club folded, all depending. It shall be separated in sub-sections, should there be a large amount of information available.
* The team's current roster, with links to the article about the concerned player
* A season-by-season section providing statistical info about the team - number of wins, losses, points, standing, etc. For clubs with a long history, creating an article exclusively for this purpose is perfectly acceptable (see for instance Philadelphia Flyers seasons); a small table featuring the last five or ten seasons is still a great addition to the team article in this case.
* A list of the former captains, there again with internal links
* A list of the greatest players to have played for the team (links, links, links!)
* A list of the historic top scorers of the team (did I say you should include links?). Here too, creating a separate article for clubs with long histories is appropriate.
* A See also section
* An External links section, with links notably to the team's official website
* Categories. 
** First one must be the country in which it is based: :Category:Canadian ice hockey teams, :Category:American ice hockey teams, :Category:Russian ice hockey teams and so on shall be used as the first category.
** Then, next category shall be :Category:XX team, the XX being the name of the league in which the team plays. Should the SAME team have played in more than one league throughout its history (ex.:Winnipeg Jets, Edmonton Oilers, etc.), then as many appropriate categories shall be used. In these cases by exemple, it would be :Category:World Hockey Association team and :Category:National Hockey League team. Please note that the league name is always written in full, and not with initials (:Category:NHL team, for instance, is not accepted). The only exception accepted is :Category:ECHL team (also applies to :Category:ECHL player and so on), because the league's full official name has changed from East Coast Hockey League to ECHL.
Categorizing leagues is easier; regardless of geographical location, they are all categorized under :Category:Ice hockey leagues. The category :Category:Ice hockey in Canada may however be an interesting addition for leagues in Canada, and so on for other leagues of other countries.
==Templates==
===Portals===
Most, if not all, articles on this site fall into at least one of the portals featured here; therefore, most if not all pages should have a way to indenfy what portal(s) they are belonging to. There exists (or will exist) a special template for each of these that should be placed at the end of the article, along with most other templates, before the categories section to link it to applying portal(s). For exemple, Peter Forsberg, who is Swedish, falls into the {{Swedish hockey portal}}:
Please note that you can link to as many portals as it applies. For exemple, Taro Nihei is a player who was born and trained in Sweden, but of Japanese descent, who later adopted Japanese nationality to represent Japan in international competitions. Nihei's article thus applies to both the Swedish and the Japanese hockey portals; therefore, his article will feature both the {{Swedish hockey portal}} and {{Middle-Eastern, Asian and Oceanian hockey portal}} templates to identify him as such.
These templates apply equally to players, teams, leagues and so on.
===Under construction===
When you are in the middle of the process of writing a long article you can't create all at once, when you are totally revamping an existing one or when you are creating an article that has been requested (please see Requesting articles) using the {{NotReady}} template at the top of the page will let the other people, who may be tempted to revert your edits or redo your article in your place in another way than that you planned, or to warn the reader that there are big works in progress and that they may want to consider dropping by at a later time to see a more detailed and better article.
==Special cases==
===Two players with the same name===
Should two players or hockey persons have the same forenames and lastnames, with the same orthograph, then the initial (root) article should be turned into an Homonymy page (click on the previous link for help on how to do that). Then, a new article shall be created for both, following this simple structure: Firstname Lastname (Birthyear). An exemple for this is Artem Anisimov; two players sharing that name have an article on IHW. This first has his own article at Artem Anisimov (1976), while the second has his at Artem Anisimov (1988). If those two players had been born on the same year, then their whole birthdate would be included in the brackets (ex.: June 27th 1976). Each player article must mention the existence of other player(s) of the same name and link to the root article. The correct format would be to write in italics at the top of the article For other players named Artem Anisimov, please see Artem Anisimov, followed by the tag <HR>. Text should be centered with the tag . The homonymy header will look like this:
For other players named Artem Anisimov, please see Artem Anisimov.
===Two people with the same name===
It may happen that, say, a player and a coach, both have the same name. Since they are known for distinct activities within the game, there is no need to distinguish them by birth date; that'd actually be more confusing than anything. For this situation, it is best to distinguish the two individuals by their role. For instance, a fictive player named Dietmar Müller and a coach named Dietmar Müller would have their articles named respectively named Dietmar Müller (player) and Dietmar Müller (coach). The root article Dietmar Müller would be a homonymy page. Again, both the player's and the coach's page would have a header linking to the root article (as described in the previous section). Should one of the two people strongly outshine the other (say, one is a succesful NHLer and the other is an obscure junior coach), then the root article Dietmar Müller would be for the player, and Dietmar Müller (coach) would still be for the coach; Dietmar Müller (disambiguation) would be the homonymy page in such instance.
===Distinct teams with the same name===
Sometimes, defunct team names are resurected after a while by new franchise owners or when the club moves to a new city. When this happens, an homonymy page shall be created on the main article linking to all the iterations of the team. The article for each of these shall be named after this structure: Team name (founding year-folding year). Of course, the folding year only applies to teams that no longer exist; should the team still be active, it should rather be (founding year-present). If the same team name is used in more than one league, then the articles can simply be differenciated by putting the league in the brackets. Obviously, each of the separate articles shall have a note at their very top of the page, before the real article begins, mentioning the existence of other teams with the same name and linking to the root article, in case the reader acidentally stumbled upon the wrong article or want to know about that team's homonyms.
A superb exemple is the Cleveland Barons, the name having been worn by an NHL team and two distinct AHL ones. The main article Cleveland Barons is an homonymy page; the NHL's Barons can be found at Cleveland Barons (NHL), and the AHL sides at Cleveland Barons (AHL, 1937-1973) and Cleveland Barons (AHL, 2001-2006). Please note that if the team is not a new team using an old name but well a returning old team who reactivates its old name (it sometimes happens for teams to become dormant when finances don't allow them to keep operating and to return at a better time in the future). In this case, since it is the same team, it doesn't undergo the naming rule (unless some other team also used that name). Those have a single article.
Also, when categorizing players who played for those teams, don't forget that categories for these teams bear the same name that their article, therefore, players who played for the second AHL Cleveland Barons fall in the :Category:Cleveland Barons (AHL, 2001-2006) player.
===Leagues with the same name===
Just like for teams, sometimes new leagues resurrect that of an older, extinct one. When this happens, an homonymy page must be created for the league name, linking to both leagues with their dates of existence in brackets.
===Duplicates and good common sense===
The broader your look at, the more likely you are to find duplicate names for teams, especially. How many obscure junior team has adopted the name of a major pro one? When one team eclipses any potential duplicate by its difference of level of play, there is no need to follow the previously mentioned rules. It is chiefly for professional clubs, major and minor ones altogether. For a qualifying junior team with a duplicate name, a simple mention at the very beginning of the main article does the trick perfectly (of the format "For the junior team of the same name, please see link to junior team's article, with an horizontal line to separate this note from the article's core); the junior team just has to be named along the lines of "Team Name (Junior)". To that level, if two or more junior teams have worn the same name, the rules for duplicate teams apply.
==Articles from Wikipedia==
Wikipedia has been covering ice hockey for a long time and many good articles have been written there. Considering the fact it is a free content encyclopedia, technically, all of the articles over there could be copied/pasted here, though it is not particularly recommanded, as we strive to be different (and better!) from Wikipedia and not just a projet that merely is a simple copy of something that already exists elsewhere. However, should you find across an article that has been copied from Wikipedia, or should really wish to copy one yourself, please pay attention to the following details:
* Categories: while some of our categories are similar to those from Wikipedia (:Category:Montreal Canadiens player by exemple (be careful there is no "s" at the end of "player", though), and other team player categories), many others are different. For exemple, we don't use the :Category:Living person, nor categories about ethnic-Canadians/Americans/whichever (like :Category:Canadian of Croatian descent for Joe Sakic). There are also different names here for categories found over there as well: :Category:Lethbridge Broncos alumni on Wikipedia would simply be :Category:Lethbridge Broncos player here. :Category:Ice hockey players at the 2002 Winter Olympics there is :Category:2002 Olympian here (as we don't need to distinguish between the many sports nor between Winter/Summer here). We, however, like to mention the year of birth and the hypothetical year of death of the people we cover with the categories :Category:Born in XXXX and :Category:Dead in XXXX.
* Templates: Many (if not most) templates used on Wikipedia aren't used here, or are different. For exemple, we don't use navigation boxes here. They serve little to no purpose, it's easier and often not that much bigger to have one single template with all the dates and winners (in the case of trophy winners) than those navigation boxes that sometimes get terribly long and give little info. We also have our own versions of other templates. It is possible that you find a working Wikipedia template on some pages here. It either means it has been adopted here as well (not so common) or that it has been copied along with a full article from Wikipedia (which is the usual situation). They should be replaced, when possible.
* General writing style: Be careful the rules from the other parts of the manual are respected in the Wikipedia article (bolded name to begin the article with, date and place of birth when available, etc). IHW's style has been inspired by Wikipedia's, and as such ressembles it very much. Just pay attention to the details.
* Credits: Finally, there exists a template here on the Ice Hockey Wiki that has been created to specify that a large part of the article, if not the whole article, comes from Wikipedia; this template is {{Wikipedia}} and looks like this:
This template indicates where the content of the article comes from and credits its original author(s). It should be used on every page that has been taken from Wikipedia, whether in large part or entirely.
==Categories==
Categories have been mentioned several times already in this manual. This is not surprising, as they are very important. Basically, categories allow to classify every article that share a certain characteristic together. For instance, every player who has ever played for the Los Angeles Kings should, once an article about them is written, be given the category :Category:Los Angeles Kings player. If you click on a category link, you will be led to a page listing every page which have been tagged with this category. It becomes a powerful tool for whoever wants to learn more about that precise aspect of the game.
An article, whichever it is, can be given any number of categories, from one to an hypothetic several hundreds, as long as they apply to the article. Of course, you will never see an article with hundreds of categories! But you will see on several instances articles with some 20-30 categories. Those are usually well-travelled players who tend to change team about every season or so.
===How to decide which category applies===
When one begins editing, it may be confusing to decide what categories to give to which article, especially since there are litterally thousands of active categories on this Wiki. However, it is usually very intuitive, and one learns fast what categories to use and not to use. For a player, the first logical category is the one for its nationality (e.g. :Category:Canadian hockey players). The second obvious one is its year of birth (e.g. :Category:Born in 1983). Then comes the categories regarding the player's resumé. A player has played for eight different teams in his career? Then that's as many categories that should be added (they all have the format :Category:TEAM NAME player). The player was drafted to the NHL? Another category fits (:Category:TEAM NAME draft picks). Has he won a trophy? There are categories for that too (for instance, :Category:Vezina Trophy winners). If the player has retired, then a category named :Category:Retired in YEAR is appropriate. Your player was a former international Austrian player? There is a category for that too (:Category:Member of the Austrian National Team). Was he an olympian in 1976 to boot? Tag him with :Category:1976 Olympian.
You get the point. Which category to tag an article with is usually fairly logical and intuitive. Take the time to look at a couple of articles to give yourself an idea of how it's done.
===How to avoid confusion with some categories===
There are some categories that may pose a little bit of problems when comes the time to tag articles with. Those refer to particular special cases, which will be discussed here.
====Special case 1 - renamed teams====
In 2006, the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim were officially renamed the Anaheim Ducks as the team cut all its ties with Disney. This move brought an interrogation related to categories. Should players who played for the Ducks prior to 2006 fall into :Category:Mighty Ducks of Anaheim player and those who played for the team after 2006 fall into :Category:Anaheim Ducks player? And what about those players who played for the team before and after 2006, will they have two categories? The answer is no. It is not logical to have two categories in this case, since the team is the same. There was no folding, no relocating, no complete team roster change - it's all the same players, in the same city, in the same franchise, but with a slightly different name. Therefore, it has been decided that there would be a single category kept: :Category:Anaheim Ducks player. The one factor that decides if there should be two distinct categories or a single one is whether there was a relocation to another city or a folding.
The same goes for other teams which, through time, have modified a bit their name without moving. The California Golden Seals, who sported three different names before moving (California Seals, Oakland Seals and California Golden Seals) will go into a single category: :Category:California Golden Seals player. In all case, it is the most recent name that is retained.
====Special case 2 - European teams with varying spellings ====
This situation can become quite a headache. Should it be EC VSV, VSV EC, Villach SV, Villacher SV, EC Villach SV, EC Villacher SV or the full Eishockey Club Villacher Sportverein? This is extremely confusing, especially since all of those variations can refer correctly to the same team, and are often indeed used on various sources. There is little concensual rule on this matter; however, it is preferable to have the name of the town where the team is based written in full. In this case for instance, the retained name has been :Category:Villacher SV player; it could have also been EC Villacher SV, for instance. The "add categories" tool at the bottom of the article/editing window is precious to solve this situations. When you start typing the name of the team, you will usually see the concensual designation appear as a suggestion by the tool. You can then simply pick it. This kind of confusion described here is especially present among German and Austrian teams with a name of a form similar to that of Villach above.
Sometimes, teams with a name like this are at some point of their history renamed (without moving - see special case 1), adding to the confusion. Here again, the most recent name prevails on the former ones. For instance, Düsseldorfer EG is nowadays known as the DEG Metro Stars, and therefore, categories should be :Category:DEG Metro Stars player. Those ambiguous situations do require a basic knowledge on the part of the writer of the naming history of the team, which can be teduous even for the specialists - HK Ryazan has had nine different names through its existence!! Not so many people would know that Krasnoye Znamya Ryazan was the name of team from 1959 to 1962 and many would create a new category, thinking of a different team. Do a quick search before typing a category name in this kind of case. Here again, use the subsection of the editing window alloted to categories, as when you type something, a list of matching categories will appear. Try typing the name of the town the team is based in. If what appears fits, use it. If in doubt, please do further researching on the internet or ask someone else who works on European hockey articles on this wiki (such as User:Yannzgob).
Category:Help