Little Tail Wiki:Manual of Style

This page serves as a general guide to constructing clean, consistent and easy to parse pages for all of Little Tail Wiki. By following the Manual of Style and other guides listed in the bottom navigation box, users should be able to smoothly form articles, upload files appropriately, and so on.

Little Tail Wiki is powered by MediaWiki, an open source wiki software that many independently-run encyclopedias use. As such, we utilize extensions and Gadgets to bring everything together.

Language and formatting

This wiki is purely in American English. We currently do not have any plans to host other languages. There will be some instances where Japanese is used throughout the site, which is only for names, titles of media, untranslated works, etc.. For editors, it is not required to be fluent in Japanese.

When writing, there are some general rules to follow.

Punctuation

In addition to sticking to American English, for consistency, the Oxford comma is preferred. Singular possessive noun's should also always end in an apostrophe and s regardless of if the name ends in s (e.g., Taranis's).

Headings

Headings should be written with sentence case capitalization, as seen throughout this article. This applies to all header sizes.

DO NOT insert links within headers! This is disastrous on mobile and can throw off articles functionally and visibly.

Perspective

Story summaries and history sections should always be written using an in-universe perspective. Write as if you are part of the world, and avoid phrases such as "in X chapter."

Tenses Used

Articles must be written in the present tense by default. When editing an article about a character, it does not matter if said character is deceased, missing, or absent in any other fashion. Please write in present tense in order to avoid confusion.

Past tense is allowed to avoid confusion if summarizing a story and a flashback occurs or an event is mentioned to have occurred in the past, such as when summarizing a character's backstory. However, in the case of summarizing works fully set in the past such as Red Data Children, default to present tense.

Names and titles

Many names and titles need to be capitalized in title case. This includes:

• Character names
• Robot/vehicle names
• Attack names
• Location names
• Group names
• Video game names
• Chapter names
• Any proper noun

Additionally, certain names and titles must be italicized in this wiki. This rule is to help articles tidily written and easy to parse for readers. Please apply this to the following:

• Website names
• Video game titles
• Book titles

Editors do not need to italicize character names or proper nouns that are outside of these requirements.

The italicization rule does not apply to infoboxes.

Linking to articles

Linking to articles when possible makes the wiki easier to navigate. Typically, you should only link to the first mention of a topic in an article. It is not against the rules to have duplicate links as long as they are sufficiently spread apart however, and this can be useful with longer pages. Topics mentioned in infoboxes should also always be linked regardless of if they are linked elsewhere in the article.

Editing Pages

Little Tail Wiki has two edit modes - Visual Editor and Source Editor.

Visual Editing

The Visual Editor is a simple yet powerful way to edit most pages here in the wiki. If you've previously edited for Little Tail Wiki back in the previous host, you'll already be very familiar with this mode. To enter the Visual Editor, click the "Edit" button atop the article if it's available.

This mode is perfect for quick simple edits and image formatting. If you're aiming to make more delicate and specific edits then please use the Source Editor instead.

Source Editor

The Source Editor is the default mode to editing all articles, templates, modules, CSS and Gadgets within the wiki. It is the recommended method to editing here in this wiki as it can more precisely put pages together and make proper use of Lua-based templates. To use the Source Editor, click the "Edit Source" link seen atop the page.

The Source Editor makes use of Wikitext, a unique coding language used in MediaWiki-based websites. If extra guidance is needed, please refer to the official formatting guide from MediaWiki.

Creating Modules & Templates

This is for advanced editors.

Templates and modules work on two different coding language sets, but can also work in tandem. Templates utilize Wikitext, HTML and sometimes CSS if needed. Modules exclusively work on Lua, Scribunto and Captiunto and must be called upon with an invoke command through its template counterpart in order to render.

When creating a template, it's heavily advised to provide documentation as some templates will not appear on their respective pages.

Here is how to properly format a template page:

<includeonly>
[TEMPLATE CODE OR INVOKE COMMAND HERE]
</includeonly>
<noinclude>
{{documentation}}
</noinclude>

It is imperative that the includeonly and noinclude tags are used in this fashion, as the lack of both will render the documentation box with the template in all articles it's used in. When the documentation template is created, there will already be a hyperlink ready for editors to quickly jot down that template's syntax guide.

Modules, when created, will also provide its own module-focused ".../doc" hyperlink for the same purpose. These should be made for more comprehensive guides, while the template's documentation provides a more easily digestible guide for users who are not as familiar with Lua.