Manual of Style

This **Manual of Style** is a collection of rules of thumb and
guidelines for giving our wiki a consistent look and feel. It is intended as a handy reference for editors. Feel free to suggest or discuss guidelines, over on the Discussion page.

## General Rules

### Editing

* Follow the format of existing pages as much as possible.
* Add, if possible, a descriptive summary when editing a page.

* A "minor edit" is a fix to a typo or small change that does not affect the page, with no summary required.

* Avoid using too literal pieces of text from the source material. Quoting (part of) a sentence is allowed, but should be distinguished by using "double quotes". However, write text as much as possible in your own phrasing.

### Spelling

* Words should be spelled using the American English spelling.

### Punctuation

* For quotations, use "double quotes" and 'single quotes' for nesting quotations; thus "quotations 'within' quotations".

* Write formally. Avoid using contractions such as don't, can't, won't, would've, or they'd.

* Avoid using slashes to join words. Instead, spell it out.

### Tense

* Sections that cover events taking place before the novels should be written in past tense. However, events taking place in the book series should utilize present tense - even if the event is outdated by new books in the series.

## Article layout

### Article title

* The title of an article should be a recognizable name or description of the topic that is natural, sufficiently precise, concise, and consistent with those of related articles. Preferably, the name of the article is a representation of the way the topic is phrased in the texts of *The Tarot Sequence*.
* Please try to avoid using ‘The’ in the title of the page so that the pages don't get alphabetized under 'T.'

### Introductory paragraph

* An article should begin with an introductory lead section which summarizes the subject's status when it is introduced in the story. It is followed by the rest of the article divided into sections, each with a section heading.

* If there are at least four section headings in the article, a navigable table of contents is generated automatically and displayed between the lead and the first heading.
* As a form of spoiler protection, on character pages plot details from the books should be presented in a chronological context through the Biography section.

### References and notes

* For all text, references must be added.
* All references and sources are combined under the same subsection: "References". For this, simply type <references/> at the bottom. Within the text, books can be cited using using the wiki coding: <Ref>text</ref>
* For help with citations, see this page.

* Please use book title, chapter number, and chapter title for references, like so:
	+ *The Last Sun*, Chapter 2, The Tower
* Cite only the books and stories published or self-published by KDE. We will eventually be including information that KDE has shared in public (Tweets, interviews), but need to establish a compendium/citations system first.

## Images

* Uploaded images must be related to *The Tarot Sequence.*

* Be watchful not to overwhelm an article with images by adding more just because you can.

* Permission to use an image should always be requested from the artist. Earlier given permission does not apply to new images. Always credit the artist.

* Take care not to start a page with an image; If you do, in mobile view the image will be the first thing a reader sees, instead of an introductory paragraph.

## Infoboxes

* Please do **not** use the generic 'Character' infobox template for character pages. Instead use our customized 'Profile' infobox for character pages. This can be found by searching the Insert>Infobox option on the editing toolbar, or the code can be found here.

## Categories

* Each page and each image should be labeled with one or more categories, as appropriate. You can use the Categories Overview to find out more on how they are organized.