Birdstories Wiki Editing Guide

## General Guidelines

* Write with helpful and full advice in mind. Try to make explanations readable in mind for someone who does not know anything about Birdstories.

* Make sure that the information added is factual and correct, and not opinion or speculation.
* Always provide an edit summary when making changes to any page. ( This helps other editors easily identify what changes you have made to a page when viewing its page history.)

* **Proofread edits** before saving.

## Language and spelling

Pages are written in **English only**, preferably American English over all other styles in order to maintain consistency across the pages (example: color vs colour).

## Capitalization

Please capitalize all words that refer to a **specific item** named in the book. For anything else, follow traditional sentence case rules. For example:

* The Flying Tornado
* The Tiara of Truth

* Dark Zone

## Punctuation

Please follow traditional punctuation rules on this Wiki, such as:

* Using serial comma (example: write “ One, two, and three“ rather than “one, two and three“.)
* Using a single space after a period or any other punctuation mark used to end a sentence

## Date and time

All times should preferably be in 12-hour/24 hour notation and use Pacific time. Depending on whether Daylight Saving is currently active, please use and clearly label with either PDT (UTC-7) or PST (UTC-8).

For date and times that are written out, use the following format:

* Monday, December 27, 2021 at 11:45 PST (UTC-8)
* Tuesday, April 7 at 00:45 PDT (UTC-7)
* December 27 2021
* December 27
* April 7 2020

Please note: Do not use the ordinal indicator (st, nd, rd, th) for dates in **articles** and **sortable tables**. All dates and times using solely numbers should follow ISO 8601:

* 2020-04-07
* 13:45:00
* 2021-12-27T13:45:00

## Numbers in texts

Here are some standard rules regarding numbers in description:

Most style guides state that numbers under 10 must be spelled out:

* I counted two olives in the jar.

Numbers **greater than 10** can be written in numerals:

* I found 12 earplugs on his desk.

Be consistent within a sentence or paragraph:

* The wind blew the 12 earplugs into the jar with the 2 olives.

## Credits

Credits should be given in articles, within an image's caption, in the file name itself, and\or in the description on the file page.

When crediting a user, please use the following format:

* Credit to *username* on Facebook/Twitter/Discord etc.
* FLYtornado-Truth-Tiara-feather-Beak-*username*.png (for files name)
* In the Summary textbox of the file upload form (Special:Upload)

## Major changes

If you plan to make **major** changes to a page, it is advised and requested by the administration team to test your work on a personal blog page beforehand. The contributors to the wiki put in a lot of their time and effort and we want to make sure that **major** changes do not undermine their work. Sometimes a page is built a particular way and breaking that page can trigger a cascade of other issues. **Major** changes include but are not limited to:

* Replacing many images with the same content
* Deleting a lot of content
* Drastically changing a page which makes it unrecognizable by the community
* Splitting a page into a multitude of smaller pages

In order to respect the work of other contributors, please share your proposed **major** changes with us (admins) before putting them live. If you have an idea for a **major** change or have a blog page with your edits already made, request a review by posting it to any Wiki Staff member. We want everyone to feel welcome and for contributors to keep editing.

Any large makeover that does not follow this guideline may be reverted without warning.

## Media: Images and videos

* Any images and videos added to the Wiki should either be added by the **creator themselves**, or explicitly credited to their owners by the editor. *No media may be posted without prior consent.* It is recommended to credit yourself when adding your own creations or infographics, either in the name of the files, or in the infographic itself when possible.
* Reworking an infographic/image by adding or removing elements in a manner such that the previous image is still distinguishable does not make you its owner. *Always* obtain consent.
* Keep filenames informative; **do not upload under names such as IMG\_5031.** Rather, use concise yet sufficiently clear names. This facilitates smoother gallery creation and is a long term for indexation.
* **Use PNG file types over JPG** whenever possible in order to keep the ability to exchange the image for a transparent vector in the future.

## Photographing Looks, Faces, Feathers, etc.

Examples on how to capture these images

(Above) Table One

More examples on how to capture these images

(Above) Table Two