Help:Style

General

Like on most wikis, articles can be edited by people who didn't initially create them. The edits should fill in incomplete information, remove incorrect or inappropriate information, or improve the style of the article. Written style should be similar to what is found in professional publications. This page documents some additional style issues specific to this wiki.

Scope

The wiki is dedicated to role-playing games. Items described in the wiki should be or belong to an RPG game, be a universal supplement appropriate for RPG games, or be a periodical devoted to gaming.

Also, we don't cover items that are already covered on the main acaeum site.

Articles

Most articles in the main namespace are devoted to RPG items. Every article should have have at least one printing block (i.e. an invocation of the {{Printing|...}} template) and at least one image of the item. The person uploading the image and creating the article should have physical possession of the item. The article can have multiple printing blocks, and in fact all printings for an item should appear in the same article. As a rough guideline, if the entities have the same or nearly the same title and belong to the same game system, then treat them as different printings of the same item, regardless of the terminology the publisher used to distinguish the entities.

Page Names

For the page name of an item, use the title of one of the printings. If the name begins with the article "The", you may need to specify the sort order in the various categories the item appears in. Example: at the bottom of The Adventure Begins put [[Category:Dungeon Crawl Classics|Adventure Begins, The]]. If two different game systems have items with the same title, use the game name in parens to distinguish one of them, e.g. Player's Handbook (HackMaster).

Categories

To keep track of every item with cover art by Erol Otus, we put articles for those items in the category Erol Otus. This causes those articles to automatically be listed on the page Category:Erol Otus. We have a category for each cover artist, author, game, setting, company, periodical, and year. Each of those categories should in turn belong to one of these supercategories: People, Games, Settings, Companies, Periodicals and Years.

Category Pages

Category pages in the Games, Settings, and Periodicals category with 4 or more articles should have a short gallery of 4 images at the top of the category page. If we don't have articles for all the items, create a page in the Requested_Articles namespace and put a link to it beneath the gallery on the category page. On the other hand, if the category is complete or close to complete, create a full gallery of thumbnails at Gallery:CATEGORY and put a link to it on the category page so users can browse by thumbnail.

The category page can contain a written description, but it should be very short. We don't want to push the automatically generated list of items in the category completely below the fold. If you would like to write more about the category, create a page in the Essay: namespace and put a link to it in the category page.

We put links to the games, settings, companies, and periodical with the most articles on the Main Page. Games, settings, and periodicals on the main page should have short galleries: to keep the site attractive, we want pages linked by the main page to have images on them.

Written Descriptions

Written descriptions on articles are optional but desirable. Here are some suggestions to keep articles interesting:

• Don't explain basic concepts. Assume the reader understands RPGs and knows how to play some edition of D&D.
• Don't put more than a single short paragraph of text above the first printing block. There should always be an image above the fold.
• Facts that cannot be verified by having physical possession of the item should have some sort of refence: a link to a website or a written source in a footnote. Speculation can be put into the discussion page for an article.
• On the other hand, facts that can be so verified should not have a citation.
• Create links to related items or categories. If item is described on the main acaeum website, use the external link notation: [ ]. Otherwise use the internal link notation: [[ ]]. Note: the internal link notation can be used even if the article page does not exist yet. For categories, use the {{L|CATEGORY}} or {{L|CATEGORY|PIPE_TRICK_NAME}} notation to link.
• Value judgements can guide the length of an article, but personal opinion should be avoided, in part because articles are not signed and are edited by multiple people. Feel free to put a personal opinion in the discussion page.
• Keep written descriptions short and avoid redundancy.

Discussion Pages

If you leave a comment in a discussion page, sign it with the ~~~~ notation.