Talk:Manual of Style

Singular Article Titles? (2007)

About article names being in singular rather than plural: I submit that the name of races and ethnic groups should be in plural (Darrians rather than Darrian). Vilani, Zhodani, etc. are also in the plural, it's just that in these cases the plural is the same as the singular. I would also think that there are other cases where the plural would be more correct than the singular, but I can't come up with an example off the cuff. Rancke 16:32, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

The reason for the singular titles vs plurals (and the older ordering style for the personal name articles) is for ease of wikifying (adding wiki formatting) to articles, primarlly links. You can create a link with different text by using a '|' separator (e.g. [[Darrians|Darrian]] will display the text "Darrian" as a link and when clicked will go to "Darrians" article). You can also turn a singular name article into a plural link by adding "s" outside the link. (e.g. [[Darrian]]s will have a full link of "Darrians" and connect to the "Darrian" article). Since it is easier to create plural links from singular article titles the prefered style is to request singular article titles. A similar argument can be used for the order of names for the titles of articles about people.

The "article titles are singular" style is used by Wikipedia and every other wiki on Wikia. Unless there is an overwhelmingly compelling reason for making the article title a plural, I would like to keep the guideline that all article titles are to be singular. Tjoneslo 16:51, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I checked how Wikipedia handled it, and they used "'Ethnicity' people", which sounds like a good solution to my problem. So, 'Darrian people' instead of 'Darrians' (and instead of 'Darrian' which just sounds wrong to me). Acceptable? Rancke 17:09, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Does this work for some of the alien names? For example, does K'kree people work? Droyne people, Hiver people, Jgd-ll-jagd people? Should it be Fteirle or Fteirle people? I'm not trying to be difficult here, just trying the options. I like the idea of including "people" to distinguish between the ethnic group and the language (e.g. Gevgh). Tjoneslo 23:00, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

It certainly work for distinguishing 'Aslan people' from 'Aslan species'. (And it shouldn't be 'Fteirle'. That's what those Aslans call themselves. We Imperials call them by their real name, Aslans ;-). As for the rest, yes it sounds a bit awkward. But so does 'Danish people'. 'Danes' would be my preference, but if that is ruled out, it's a workable alternative. I'd say the same applies to aliens. It sounds awkward, but it's tolerable. Rancke 13:40, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Correct grammer and spelling should be an compelling reason to alter the "singular only" rule. If an article title about Danish people should properly be titled "Danes", then we should use the proper title. The core reason for using the singular only rule is to aid in wiki formatting, but none of the alternatives address the ease of wiki formatting. I will add the race name exception to the manual of style (using the plural according to the language). Tjoneslo 15:44, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

InfoBox Entries (2007)

I've just taken a look at some of the pages for the various LBBs. We don't appear to have a standard for these yet. Examples: The InfoBox for LBB1 has Publisher Game Designers Workshop; the InfoBox for Mercenary (book) has Publisher GDW. Yeah, I know it's only a minor thing, as both links lead to the same page, but we should decide how we're going to write these sorts of things for consistency's sake. Gruffty 14:50, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

BTW, there's supposed to be an apostrophy at the end of "Designers" in the full GDW title. Or is the fact that it's missing to do with how Wikia uses apostrophies? Gruffty 14:53, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

The proper way is to use the Template:GDW, as in {{GDW}}, which expands to Game Designers' Workshop. Tjoneslo 20:13, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Images from books? (2007)

I thought it best to ask here: I have an extensive CT/MT/T4/GT deadtree library. There are a lot of pictures that would sit nicely in a lot of the pages here - I've got some good Hiver (sic!) ones. However, before I go uploading GIFs of stuff, I'd like to find out if we are actually allowed to put up pictures from inside the books? Gruffty 22:44, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Pictures are almost always covered by copyright. Low resolution images of book covers are usually allowed to illustrate the product in question under fair use. Even if you were to get permission from the book publisher, the use of art in books is usually limited to a single use only, so you would actually need to get permission from the artist. Dcorrin 12:41, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

OK, thanks for the info Dan. Gruffty 22:40, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Copyright images (2017)

I would propose that this site follow the Wikipedia policy on copyrighted material ("Non-free content") – not just for book covers, but for all copyrighted content.

One point specific to this site (absent from Wikipedia) is the standard credit to Far Future Enterprises at the bottom of articles.

— Steve98052 (talk) 00:40, 13 January 2017 (EST)

---

There are several things wrapped up in this, so I'll try an unpack them.

The Traveller Wiki, unlike Wikipedia, has no policy or goal to provide free, open content. Because Wikipedia's core mission is to provide free, open content the policy page is very aggressive about discouraging people from adding copyrighted content. The Traveller Wiki, on the other hand, is presenting copyrighted material under license from FFE and/or the original authors. The standard credit to FFE at the bottom of every page is part of this. The requirement to include the Template:Sources in every article is another.

Because the missions of the two wiki's are this divergent I would ask you to provide the specific suggestions of what parts of the policy page we should adopt. Tjoneslo (talk) 10:15, 13 January 2017 (EST)

---

Hi Thomas, where do we fit the FUP (Fair Use Policy) into all of this?

IS the FFE one the FUP? Looks like it...

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 10:42, 13 January 2017 (EST)

---

We have a special license from FFE to publish their copyrighted material in excess of what is allowed by the Fair Use Policy. We also publish material from other writers, including the wiki staff, which don't fall under the FUP, but does come under the CC-BY-SA license of the wiki. It's also the case we have some material from other publishers which have their own Fair Use policy different from FFE's. Anyone copying content from the wiki needs to be aware of, and follow, all of the policies. This is why having the Template:Sources box in each article correctly updated is important. Tjoneslo (talk) 17:25, 13 January 2017 (EST)

---

Is that what is here: Copyright?

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 18:17, 13 January 2017 (EST)

---

I see. This gets complicated, almost to the point that copyright issues could be their own page. The various fair use policies quoted on the Copyright page clarify things somewhat. Maybe adding a link to that page would be an improvement, possibly with a pointer to the Wikipedia copyright policy with advice that the latter should be followed when the former doesn't grant permission? Maybe most of the details belong on Copyright rather than this page.

— Steve98052 (talk) 06:11, 18 January 2017 (EST)

The Copyright page is linked at the bottom of every page, in the sources template, and at the bottom of the edit page. If you want to suggest additional language for the copyrights, please put it there.

There is also a What not to post page that used to be linked from the main page as part of the please contribute section. Tjoneslo (talk) 22:33, 18 January 2017 (EST)

Disambiguating Worlds (2007)

I'm not entirely happy with the double parentheses solution, but the reasons for it are good. And I don't have a better suggestion.

But my real question here is, should we use Sector Map as an official list of unique sector abbreviations when coming up with these disambiguated names? (Are they unique? It looks it, but I haven't studied it in detail.)

And I assume that the base "X (world)" page should always be the disambig page, no matter how well known one of them might be to Traveller players? ...With an exception for Terra (world). --Rindis 17:11, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

No. The sector map abbreviations contain a number of duplicates. (There are three Ba's and four Da's). Some of the sectors use three or four characters in their name (Core and Ley for example). I'll go back through the list and create longer (and unique) abbreviations for the duplicates. Tjoneslo 18:17, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Update. There are enough of these I'd suggest going to a three character abbreviation (except the two word names). Even then there are still duplicates. Tjoneslo 18:22, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Wow, more than I thought. 7 duplicates at three character (Ext, For, Har, Kha, Lis, Tre, Zhi). Tjoneslo 18:49, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Ouch. Yes, this is a little more challenging than I thought. A common practice in abbreviating is to skip non-leading vowels, which should help on most of those. Also, you might consider designating one as 'primary' (closer to Core seems good) which gets the two letter designation, and then the other gets the three letter designation. This policy allows us to accept further names later without upsetting the established scheme because it happens to duplicate an existing 2- or 3-letter abbreviation.

(Is this worth it? I have a feeling we'll end up with something akin to Common (For[nast] 0505) and Common (For[even] 0505) if we don't build this into the scheme to begin with.) --Rindis 19:32, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

First off, I agree with Rindis that we should use X (world) as the disambiguation page.

In looking over the data base, which is nearly complete, the two character abbreviation is sufficient to make each world name unique (at least as far as searching the wiki is concerned).

I initially played with the idea of using a unique two letter code for the sector abbreviation. It became a little too confusing when applied to the 233 sectors in this wiki (not counting possible sector names for the coreward and rim routes).

I tend to believe that using the first two letters of the sector name (or first two capital letters) is intuitive in setting a standard.

We should keep in mind that the duplicate names are an rare exception, not a common occurrence. We can probably get away with the two character sector abbreviation. I think we'd have to come up with a much more radical solution to completely fix the problem. And I'm not sure we want to do that. Tjoneslo 20:25, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

The likelihood of what I outlined is infinitesimal at worst, but assuming that the Traveller universe continues to grow, it could still happen, even if it hasn't yet. However, I am a little concerned with things like "Depot (Da 0326)" and "Depot (Da 3121)", where the names look like there's two Depots in one sector starting with Da (of course, one is in Daibei and the other in Dagudashaag). However, fixing abbreviations is tougher than I thought. Thanks for the effort Tjoneslo! --Rindis 20:44, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Grammar Conventions (2015)

The request to use American spelling and grammar for articles was controversial. The founder of the wiki User:Dan Corrin was English and insisted upon English spelling and grammar. For example, Armour article. So there is a historical precedence for not insisting on American.

• Tjoneslo (talk) 18:14, 19 January 2015 (EST)

---

Hi Thomas Tjoneslo, I made a change to accommodate the point you made. What do you think?

* The following grammar conventions and spelling conventions are suggested:
** Use standard American spelling and grammar conventions although British spelling and grammar conventions are also accepted.

JTAS (Loren Wiseman) from SJG standardizes on American spelling and grammar (Please see http://www.sjgames.com/general/guidelines/authors/traveller.html), but Brtish has always been accepted and then edited to American standards. Traveller is an American-origin game, after all. I like that it's accessible to many different people though, and I can read and write several other languages.

• Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 21:25, 19 January 2015 (EST)

---

That looks great.

Tjoneslo (talk) 08:03, 20 January 2015 (EST)

---

Grammar conventions (2017)

I revised the wording here to draw in a guideline from Wikipedia: use US or British English, but don't mix them within the same article. Wikipedia also advises that once an article is set in one or the other, stick with that, unless there's a good reason to change it. The main reason to change from one to the other is if the article is a regional topic; it's appropriate to change an article to US spelling if it's about a place in the US or a person from the US, or to change an article to British spelling if it's about a place where British English is customary. It's also OK to change the spelling convention in cases of a heavy rewrite; when expanding a 100-word stub into a 2000-word good article (or correcting a long article that's generally a mess), it's fair to choose the author's preference.

I also replaced "American" with "US" because "US English" seems to be more common usage than "American English".

I think I'll add an exception for articles about Traveller topics that originated in the British-English world (Mongoose, BITS, other UK publishers, as well as things from Canada, Australia, etc.). I concur with the preference for US spelling (except for the name of the game itself) where there's no reason for one or the other, because Traveller originated in the US.

— Steve98052 (talk) 17:08, 12 January 2017 (EST)

Year of articles should be ambiguous (2017)

You wrote:

The preference is to keep articles written in the year 1105 or early 1116 as much as possible. And, the vast majority of articles are written as if the author or narrator were an academic or pedant within the Third Imperium.

As much as possible I'd like to keep the articles unclear as to which year they are written. The Wiki has incorporated data from the rebellion era, TNE, 1248, and may include data from as late as the Galaxiad era (1900+). Writing from an 1105 era about 1248 data is sort of mind bending. I recommend this be written as:

The preference is to keep dates and years in articles to be specific rather than assuming a specific date for the writer. For example, the article should say "in 1095" rather than "ten years ago". All years and dates should use the Third Imperial calendar.

Tjoneslo (talk) 17:05, 2 January 2017 (EST)

---

Ok. Makes good sense to me. No argument.

Do you want to fix it or have me do it?

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 17:13, 2 January 2017 (EST)

---

Fixed. I wanted to put the discussion here as a note to future authors to have them understand why. Tjoneslo (talk) 17:29, 2 January 2017 (EST)

---

Thank you, Thomas.

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 10:43, 13 January 2017 (EST)

Calendar template (2017)

The "Year of articles" discussion in the previous section suggests a possible template or templates: ways to indicate dates in calendars other than that of the Third Imperium. Those should never be used alone, but in some contexts they would be useful, particularly in the case of the Solomani (revised Gregorian) calendar for dates between the Solomani discovery of Jump and the conclusion of the wars between the Solomani and the Ziru Sirka. It would be handy to have a template along the lines of writing {{Date|1120|Solomani}} that produces "1120 (AD 5638 Solomani)" or {{Date|-4520|Solomani|Vilani}} that produces -4520 (AD 1 Solomani, 361 PI Vilani).

I had a spreadsheet that did those calculations more accurately than published materials actually defined them (close enough that leap seconds are the only error I didn't try to address, and I could try to adapt the calculations to Wiki template format if we can agree on a format for both the template and the desired output. It would be nice if the template could generate the date conversion table from template codes numbered from any calendar, not just Imperial, and to allow choices of year-rounded-down, year-rounded-nearest, year-date, year-date-time, year-span, year-day-span, year-day-time-span, include-year-links, etc. It would only make sense to program the template to calculate things that would actually be used, but good to define how to do things that aren't currently used in case they're needed in the future.

Looking at how Wikipedia does things (calendar conversion and unit conversion as an example of how formatting options work), "I could try" most likely means "it's not going to happen", because unless I have to learn the Lua programming language for some other reason, I don't expect to have time to take on such a project. But it might still be worth discussion to decide how such a template should be structured if anyone has time to do it.

It might be more productive for me to just try to find my old spreadsheet and convert it to a shareable Google Spreadsheet.

— Steve98052 (talk) 02:52, 13 January 2017 (EST)

---

Hi Steve, yes please.

Please contact me at CotI so that we can exchange materials other than being restricted to only this forum. I will share other materials with you as well. Thomas likes us to record communication here so I respect that wish, but email, text, and other communication methods are also important.

I have some experimental date pages on years preceding the Fifth Frontier War. I would very much like to see your data and receive your permission to post it here at the wiki.

Thank you for all that you do.

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 06:34, 13 January 2017 (EST)

Steve, there is no way to currently use the wikipedia Lua template on the Traveller wiki because the extensions required are not installed. Suffice to say there is a long technical explanation behind this.

If you look at the existing Template:Date I do attempt to perform the year conversion between the various calendars. If you can point out on the discussion page where the conversion is inaccurate, I would love to know what and where they are, and fix them.

I'm sorry I stole the {{Date}} template for the infobox, but I'm absolutely sure we can come up with a Year template do do what you are suggesting.

Tjoneslo (talk) 09:49, 13 January 2017 (EST)

---

Looking at the Template:Date, I see that I (probably) wouldn't need Lua to convert my old spreadsheet, assuming I can find it. It may depend somewhat on the precision of the software behind the #expr function.

Besides the obvious questions of whether I can find my old code, and whether it would work with this #expr, there's the question what calendars look like to finer precision than years. We all know how the Solomani calendar looks like: some variation of the elements "Wednesday, 2017 January 18, 11:29:59". (One point not necessarily known is that Traveller adopts the John Herschel modification to the the Gregorian calendar.) We also know how the Third Imperium calendar works: 018-1120 (with no leap years, and our same 24-hour clock). But Vilani, Zhodani, Aslan, K'kree, and the numerous Vargr systems? Maybe they're documented, but they're not familiar like our calendar or as simple as the Third Imperium calendar. The Vilani article, for example, mentions the date format, but nothing about times.

Incidentally, looking at the code in Template:Date, I see an apparent bug: the Zhodani calendar uses / 2.26 round 0 for the olympiad, but / 2.262 mod 3 for the year. Should it be 2.26 or 2.262? (That question probably belongs there too, unless it's fixed promptly.)

Maksim, I'll see if I can find my CotI user name. Alternatively, I'm "Steve98052" on Mongoose and "SteveS" on SJ Games.

— Steve98052 (talk) 06:49, 18 January 2017 (EST)

The #expr exposes the underlying PHP code / math functions, and you can assume a full range of double values. Unless you did something very fancy with your spreadsheet, the expr math should be sufficient.

The internals of the dating system for the other races is hidden. I know both the Aslan and K'kree time counting are described in the language sections. I believe the Zhodani calendar is similarly sort of hidden. I'd have to go back to the respective CT alien modules to re-build the originals.

I would love to see your spreadsheet, or at least the math use in it if you can find it. I know from other experience doing date math is a challenge at best.

Tjoneslo (talk) 22:43, 18 January 2017 (EST)

Wow, I actually found the old spreadsheet. It's dated 2002 December 31. It might take me a while to understand what I did that long ago; it's a mix of regular Excel and macro functions.

— Steve98052 (talk) 03:04, 20 January 2017 (EST)

Contributor guidelines (2017)

In some articles of the wiki, in addition to the usual published sources, there are contributors listed. If you are contributing to an article you may add your own contributors attribution. The general guideline for contribution is a paragraph, 50 or more words, not including infobox or formatting templates, headings or article layout, or categories.

You can make up any titles you would like (within the bounds of decorum and length), but please start the list with "Contributor: " and include a link to your user page so we can find you.

If your contribution is a full sentence, a full paragraph, or longer, please include a {{Unpublished cite|author=~~~~}} or {{Unpublished cite|author=<Your contributor title>}} for each sentence or paragraph so we can distinguish your work.

Tjoneslo (talk) 10:41, 26 September 2017 (EDT)

---

Sounds great. I always considered 1 kb or at least 10% of an article to qualify, but I like the standards you set.

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 18:59, 26 September 2017 (EDT)

Large projects

We always welcome changes to the wiki. We do ask if you embark on a project to add or update a large number of articles (say two dozen or more), to please let the community know. A posting in the Forums would be ideal. This would be to allow us to offer feedback, make suggestions to make the process easier or faster, discuss how others can help, and get updates on progress.

Tjoneslo (talk) 07:57, 1 November 2017 (EDT)

Maksim updates to the Manual of style

I disagree with these changes. Please lets discuss them.

- Tjoneslo (talk) 20:31, 9 November 2017 (EST)

---

Sure, let's talk sometime.

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 21:04, 9 November 2017 (EST)

Article naming conventions : Article capitalization

Traveller Wiki uses two case styles for article capitalization. Many of the articles use Title case (e.g. "My Article on the Subject"). There is an effort to use Sentence case (e.g. "My article on the subject") for titles. The latter is preferred, but either is acceptable.

Article naming conventions : Categories or collections

The wiki follows the Wikipedia conventions:

• The category names follow the same rules as article capitalization.
• Avoid descriptive adjectives such as famous, important, or notable in category names.
• Topic categories, that is categories about a single subject (e.g. Lancia, Major Race) should be singular. And should be named the same as the primary article on the subject. For example: Category: Lancia or Category:Major Race.
• Set Categories, categories listing a collection of articles on a subject (e.g. worlds owned by the S'mrii) should be plurals. For example Category: S'mrii worlds.