User:Aquadrizzt/Sandbox/Formatting/General

This article contains the general formatting guide for this wiki. All articles are expected to conform to style and formatting guidelines outlined below, unless they are superseded by more specific formatting.

Basic grammar and capitalization

English

In general, American English is preferred, but British English is acceptable. Changes from British English to American English should only occur when other edits are performed, or if there is variation within a single article between the use of American and British English.

Capitalization

In general, written text conforms to standard English capitalization rules. In addition, there are several items of note:

• Races and profession names are not capitalized unless they otherwise would be per regular capitalization rules.
  • ex. Asura are small. However, norn are much bigger.
• All words in skill and trait names are always capitalized, regardless of sentence placement.
  • ex. Healing Rain is a skill. It can be modified by the trait Improved Healing Rain. Improved Healing Rain grants additional healing to all allies within the radius of Healing Rain.
• Section headers and article names use sentence case; the first word is capitalized and any subsequent words are not capitalized (unless they are proper nouns).
• Disambiguation identifiers should always be lower-case unless the identifier is a proper noun.

Miscellaneous

Elegance – If a particular phrase warrants emphasis, use italics, not capital letters.
Terminology – In general, official terms are preferred over unofficial terms.

Quotations

Text taken directly from in-game or other sources should be transcribed verbatim. If there are any errors in spelling, punctuation or grammar, they should remain unchanged and be tagged with {{sic}} immediately after the error.

For flavor quotes and in-game descriptions, {{Quotation|<source>|<text>}} should be used. Note that a page whose only purpose is to host transcribed information is tagged with {{ArenaNet article}} and {{Official source}}; see Ecology of the Charr for an example.

Prose written by wiki contributors is preferred to quotations because prose provides context and flow while most quotes do not.

Links

The first instance of any page mentioned in an article should be linked to that article. All subsequent references to the same article should not be linked.

This does not extend to automatically generated lists or tables.

Stubs

Stubs are articles or sections of articles that are known to be missing currently available information. Stub tags should be placed at the top of the page and should only be used when the article as a whole needs expansion.

These are the stubs templates that are currently in use. Apply only one stub template to a stub article and use the most specific one possible:

• Category:Stubs – {{stub}}
  • Category:Event stubs – {{event-stub}}
    • Category:Personal Story stubs – {{personal storyline-stub}}
  • Category:Item stubs – {{item-stub}}
    • Category:Armor stubs – {{armor-stub}}
    • Category:Weapon stubs – {{weapon-stub}}
  • Category:Location stubs – {{location-stub}}
  • Category:Lore stubs – {{lore-stub}}
  • Category:NPC stubs – {{npc-stub}}
  • Category:Skill stubs – {{skill-stub}}

If an article has sections that are incomplete, but is not, as a whole, incomplete, then those sections should be tagged at the top with {{section-stub}}.

Ordering

Professions, races, traits and skills

• Professions are ordered first by armor class (soldier, adventurer, scholar) and then alphabetically.
  • ex. guardian, warrior, engineer, ranger, thief, elementalist, mesmer, necromancer
• Races are ordered alphabetically.
  • ex. asura, charr, human, norn, sylvari
• If both professions and races (and potentially other groupings, such as "some", "any" and "monster) are used in a list, the system changes. The order becomes "professions, some, any, races, monsters" (as applicable.)
  • ex. guardian, warrior, engineer, ranger, thief, elementalist, mesmer, necromancer, some, any, asura, charr, human, norn, sylvari, monsters

Personal storyline and events

• Events should be ordered in chronological order.
  • ex. Event 1 → Event 2 → Event 3

Weapon handedness

The use of hyphenated and non-hyphenated main and off hand is always dependent on what is being referred to.

When referring to the actual hand, use the non-hyphenated "main hand", "off hand" and "both hands".

• The right hand is a character's main hand, the left hand is the character's off hand.

When referring to the weapon in hand, use the hyphenated "main-hand", "off-hand" and "two-handed".

• The right hand is a character's main hand. If they equip a dagger in this hand, it will grant main-hand dagger skills.
• The left hand is a character's off hand. If they equip a dagger in this hand, it will grant off-hand dagger skills.
• If a character equips a weapon requiring both hands, it will grant two-handed weapon skills.

When referring to a weapon solely designed for use in the off hand, place the hyphen correctly.

• A character has access to many off-hand weapons that can never be equipped in the main hand (they are not main-hand weapons). These weapons are also known as off-hand only weapons.

See also

• Guild Wars 2 Wiki:References — for the proper syntax, formatting and use of references
• Guild Wars 2 Wiki:Image formatting — for specific details on tagging both ArenaNet and user images