FCWiki:Style guide

This Style Guide contains the guidelines for the style of all FCWiki articles. Much of the content is taken directly from the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, which can be considered a substantive guide for the style of this wiki.

While much of the content is similar, some is also specific to FCWiki. If any contradiction between the two documents arises, this page has precedence.

Editors should write articles using straightforward, succinct, easily-understood language, and structure articles with consistent layouts and formatting (which are detailed in this guide).

Article titles

A title should be a recognizable name or description of the topic that is natural, sufficiently precise, concise, and consistent with those of related articles.

For formatting guidance, note the following:

• Capitalize the initial letter, but otherwise follow sentence case (FCs that support Lua) instead of title case (FCs that Support Lua), except in cases where title case would be expected were the title to occur in ordinary text.
• Do not use articles (a, an, or the) as the first word, unless it is an inseparable part of a name or title of a work.
• The final character should not be punctuation unless it is an inseparable part of a name or a specific abbreviation or acronym. Note that many acronyms used in this wiki omit the periods between letters (FCWiki), and article titles should generally follow this convention.

Section organization

An article's content should begin with an introductory lead section - a concise summary of the article - which is never divided into sections. The remainder of the article is typically divided into sections.

Infoboxes, images, and related content in the lead section must be right-aligned.

Certain standardized templates and wikicode that are not sections go at the very top of the article, before the content of the lead section, and in the following order:

• Banner-type maintenance templates, {{stub}} tags
• An infobox, which is optional; usually also includes the first image
• An introductory image, when an infobox is not used, or an additional image is desired for the lead section (for unusually long leads, a second image can be placed midway through the lead text)

If an article has at least four section headings, a navigable table of contents appears automatically, just after the lead.

Several kinds of material (mostly optional) may appear after the main body of the article, in the following order:

• Books or other works created by the subject of the article, under a section heading "Other FCs", "Awards", etc. as appropriate (avoid "Bibliography", confusable with reference citations)
• Internal links to related FCWiki articles, with section heading "See also"
• Notes and references, with a section heading "Notes" or "References" (usually the latter), or a separate section for each in this order; avoid "Bibliography", confusable with the subject's works
• The following final items never take section headings:
  • Internal links organized into navigational boxes
  • Stub templates, if needed
  • Categories, which should be the very last material in the article's source code