Wiki Guidelines/Manual of Style

The **Manual of Style** is a style guide for all Shadows of the Past Wiki articles and official documents. It establishes our house style, to help editors produce articles with consistent, clear, and precise language, layout, and formatting. The goal is to make the encyclopedia easier and more intuitive to use. Consistency in style and formatting promotes clarity and cohesion; this is especially important within an article.

## Article titles, sections, and headings

### Article titles

An article title is a convenient label for the article, which distinguishes it from other articles.

* Each page should be titled as they are referred to in the webcomic.
* Each page should be in capitalized, including words used to distinguish them such as "Quest,' or "Charm."

### Article sections

* Articles should use the wiki headings in order to separate different sections of the page.
* Many types of pages have a set layout with specific section titles. See Layout Guide.
* Please do NOT make titles bold.

## Spelling

**American spelling** should be used on all articles on Shadows of the Past Wiki.

* Regional variations in spelling may be used in all other contexts on Shadows of the Past Wiki, such as comments, talk pages, user pages, blog posts, fanon and fan fiction.
* If quoting a source, never alter any part of the quotation, even if it does not use American spelling.

### Punctuation and footnotes

Footnotes are used to add references. "Ref" tags should immediately follow the text to which they refer, with no space before the tag. When they coincide with punctuation, the tag is placed *immediately after the punctuation*. Multiple tags should have no space between them.

## Vocabulary

**Formal use of language** is mandatory on all canon encyclopedia articles.

* Uncontracted forms such as *do not* or *it is* are the default in encyclopedic style; *don't* and *it's* are too informal.
* On encyclopedia articles, avoid such phrases as *remember that* and *note that*, which address readers directly in a less-than-encyclopedic tone. Similarly, phrases such as *of course*, *naturally*, *obviously*, *clearly*, and *actually* make presumptions about readers' knowledge, and call into question the reason for including the information in the first place. Do not tell readers that something is ironic, surprising, unexpected, amusing, coincidental, unfortunate, etc. This supplies a point of view. Simply state the sourced facts and allow readers to draw their own conclusions.

## Images

* Avoid sandwiching text between two images that face each other, or between an image and an infobox.
* Thumbnails shown in the article should generally be 200px. Images containing important detail (e.g. a map, diagram, or chart) may need larger sizes than usual to make them readable.

## Links

* To add a link in a text, surround the word with brackets (i.e. [[word]]).
* Use direct links rather than linking via a redirect page.
* When linking to a normally not capitalized word in the body of a text, it suffices to create a lower-cased link, and when linking to an article for plural use, it suffices to create the plural form of the linked word outside the link rather than creating a pipe-link.