Manual of Style
Traveller Wiki Manual of style For an introduction to Wiki editing, please see the Introduction to editing page on wikia.
For information on the most basic writing techniques and styles, which are used here, see Wikipedia's Manual of Style.
Naming articles
There are some rules regarding how articles on the Traveller wiki should be named.
- Article names should be in singular form, not plural.
- The titles of articles about individual people should be the name by which the person was most commonly known in the the Traveller universe, with later names preferred to earlier names, and full names preferred to partial names or nicknames. Titles, such as military ranks or titles of nobility, should be omitted. Articles titles about people should be in the form of "Family Name, Personal Name(s)".
- Unless the name of the article contains a proper noun, only the first word should be capitalized.
- Articles about a world (like Regina, or Terra) should have the text "(world)" appended to their article title. This is so we can distingush between (for example) the Domain of Antares, Antares Sector, Antares Subsector, Antares (system), Antares (star) and Antares (world).
- Similarly, articles about Sectors or Subsectors should be name "X Sector" (e.g. Antares Sector) or "X Subsector" (e.g. Antares Subsector).
Headings
Use the == (heading) markup for headings, not the ''' (bold) markup. Example:
===This is a heading===
which produces:
- This is a heading
If you mark headings this way, a table of contents is automatically generated from the headings in an article. Sections can be automatically numbered for users with that preference set and words within properly marked headings are given greater weight in searches. Headings also help readers by breaking up the text and outlining the article.
- Capitalize the first letter only of the first word and of any proper nouns in a heading, and leave all of the other letters in lower case.
- Avoid links within headings.
- Avoid overuse of sub-headings.
Sources
For all library articles, include a Sources template, even if you are the author. For an article published here, or other website on the internet, include the author's name in a link to the author's page. Example:
{{Sources|S1=[[Marc Miller]]}}
which produces:
If the article comes from a book, include a link to the book. Example:
{{Sources|S1=[[GURPS Traveller: Alien Races 1]]}}
which produces:
If the article comes from a magazine article, include both the magazine, the issue and the author of the article. Example: (Also see Templates)
{{Sources|S1={{JTASref|11}}, [[Marc Miller]] }}
which produces:
If the article has multiple sources, that is has been republished in several places, include all (or as many as you are sure of). Example:
{{Sources|S1={{TDref|11}}, [[Joe Fugate]]| S2=[[Alien - Vilani & Vargr]] }}
which produces:
Links
External links can be made to wikipedia or other wikias (as they are all part of the same development and not likely to vanish). Links to less than common terms, or articles on TL8 or less technologies would be appropriate. Links to any other web site should normally be in a section labeled as such.
Internal links should be made to any traveller-specific term (e.g. Vargr) this should include races, places, historical events, people, etc. Link to all current articles, and everything that you think should be an article. This includes all references to authors, elements, books, magazines, high technology, even if they don't exist yet as we can use the most wanted list to determine articles to research. Traveller dates (Imperial year) can be linked, but there is some indecision on the usefulness of this. Links should be made once on the page for each term, the first time the term is used. (e.g. Aslan should be linked the first time it is used, and not linked afterwards).
Templates
We have developed a number of templates for the site which fall into several categories. These can all be seen on the Template List page.
Wikipedia template is used when the majority of the text is copied from wikipedia, if the article is significantly different (more comprehensive) than a similar article about traveller on Wikipedia, please add the Travellerwiki template to wikipedia.
The templates: Stub, Incomplete, Detail, Complete, Language, Source and Infoboxneeded are to be used to signify that the article has issues, and needs to be addressed. Obviously it is preferrable to fix the issue, but labeling it will allow others to identify the articles that need work easily.
There are a number of infobox templates that put a box with information at the side of the page (as yet we do not have bottom boxes linking similar pages as in wikipedia. Articles that fit the type should use these templates, which include: Book, Domain, Sector, Subsector, (Planet), Ships, (Vehicles), (Weapons), Race, VIP , and Date.
There are templates to expand text and possibly reference one or more other pages. The World and WorldS for eaxample will reference the World, Sector, (Subsector) and present the format for world references in a common format. Others include TDref and JTASref to make reference to articles for those publications (others will likely follow), and short forms Imperium and Imperial (both link to Third Imperium), HIWG, sm and GDW which refer to their longer named pages.
Finally there are library templates. Each article in the library section should use either the LE (Cannon) or the LEN (non-cannon) template.
Dictionary entries
In addition to the library entiries, the Traveller wiki contains a dictionary of terms specific to the Traveller universe and translations of words from the numerous alien languages. The Traveller wiki follows the Wiktionary's manual of style for entry layout. The fundamental elements of an article:
- a word’s language (as a level 2 heading),
- its part of speech or "type" (as a level 3 heading),
- the inflection word itself, including pluralization for nouns, comparatives for adjtives and the verb tenses,
- a definition (preceded by "#", which causes automatic numbering), and,
- links in the definition for key words
The entry layout article goes into more depth about additional information to be included in each dictionary entry.