Civilization Wiki:Manual of Style

Manual of Style is under construction!

Please do not edit unless it is a spelling or grammar issue.

This Manual of Style is a basic style guide for editing and creating articles on the Civilization Games Wiki. Aside from special cases, all the requirements and rules found on this page must be followed. As such, users will need to read and familiarize themselves with the following in order to contribute to articles.

If followed correctly, this manual will act as guidelines to maintain and organize articles in a way that will harmonize the basic layout of each page and eliminate disputes between users regarding the content. Any questions, suggestions or complaints regarding these rules can be placed in the talk page.

Editing

First of all, please navigate to Special:Preferences and select "Source editor" from the "Preferred editor" drop down menu. That allows you to see the source code of the page you are editing. This is important because many of the pages use templates, and they cannot be easily edited when you don't see their code. The visual editor is also known to make unwanted edits and break the layout of our articles.

Templates are a way of standardizing the layout and looks of pages. See, for example, the Electricity (Civ5) page. The "infobox" at right is a template (called Template:Tech (Civ5)): the editor just fills in the values for the variables, and the wiki draws it as a nice table-like box. Pretty much everything has been templated for Civilization V: units, resources, buildings, etc. Similar templates also exist for Civilization IV and several other games, and experienced users can help create more if you ask.

You can create new templates by yourself or request that one be created at the help desk.

Note that all new infoboxes should be of the portable variety - that is, made with the <infobox> element and not regular tables. This ensures they can be correctly viewed on all kinds of devices, not just desktop computers with big monitors.

Grammar and mechanics

MicroProse and Firaxis Games are both American companies, so American English is the standard in their games and on this wiki. All articles should follow American English spelling, grammar, and punctuation rules; articles with names that use British English spelling should redirect to articles that use American English spelling (e.g., Armour should redirect to Armor). Dates may be written in either month-day-year or day-month-year order, as both are acceptable in the United States. Use of the serial comma is encouraged, but not mandated (especially in situations where it would introduce ambiguity).

Article contents

Main page: Forum:Wiki purpose policy proposal

This is not a historical or cultural wiki. Articles should be about the Civilization game series (and a few closely related games), its community, and the games' contents.
Articles need not contain information about the real life version of game content other than that already provided by the game.
- Link to Wikipedia instead to provide that kind of information.
The Civilopedia and Great Library entries on this wiki are copied directly from the relevant games. They are included here for completeness; please do not edit them.
Strategy and information derived from playing the games is, of course, always welcome.

Articles about cities

Articles about cities that appear in the games should be created only if one or more of the following hold true:

The city appears as a capital in at least one game or scenario.
The city appears as a city-state in at least one game or scenario.
The city appears as a Territorial City or an extra city.
The city (under one or more different names) belongs to multiple civilizations.
The city shares its name with a civilization or leader (e.g., Tahiti, Lincoln, or Victoria).

In keeping with this being a wiki about a video game series, these articles should focus primarily on the cities as they appear within the games. Real-world information, such as wonders that can be found in the city, should be limited to one or two sentences at the end of the article (e.g., "In real life, [Los Angeles] is the most populous city in present-day California and home to Hollywood.").

Articles about mods, modding, and modders

Articles that cover officially sanctioned and popular third-party mods and the people who create them, or offer explanations and tutorials related to modding the games covered on this wiki are welcome. Articles about modding should be named "Modding (CivX)/<topic>" to ensure that casual users of the wiki do not mistake them for articles about how to play a certain game. Articles about modders should use the modder's legal name as the page name if it is known (e.g., Derek Paxton and Gabriele Trovato) with their handle redirecting to the actual content page; only if a modder has requested anonymity or their legal name is not known should their handle be used as the page name of the actual content page.

Articles need not be created for content that is available on the Steam Workshop, the Civilization V Customisation Wiki, the Civilization VI Customization Wiki, or any other platforms or websites that serve as indexes of fan-made content. Links to such content may, however, be added to articles that list mods for the game(s) in question, and the existence of such content may be mentioned on the overview pages as well (e.g., "<leader> appears in n mod(s) for Civilization V." can be written in the civ5 field of the Overview template).

Ordering and purpose of article sections

While there will be some variance in the layouts of articles depending on their topics and the formatting of the infoboxes for the game they cover, those about an individual entity (e.g., a specific unit or building) will generally include an intro that gives an overview of the entity and any changes made to it in different expansion packs and game modes. (See Foreign Legion (Civ5), Landsknecht (Civ5), Lumber Mill (Civ6), and Shrine (Civ6) for examples.) The intro will be followed by these sections, in order: Strategy, Bugs (if necessary), Civilopedia entry, Trivia, Gallery/Images, Videos, Notes, References, See also, External links.

Section headings should follow sentence case unless the section is directly copied from the in-game Civilopedia. They should not contain icons or links and should generally not use special formatting (i.e., boldface or italics).

Strategy

This section provides an overview of how the entity fits into the landscape of the game. It should explain how to use the entity to its fullest potential and situations that make it much more (or less) useful than normal.

Bugs

This subsection of the Strategy section details any bugs that currently affect the entity. It should provide as much information as possible about how to trigger the bugs, what they do, and what quick fixes or workarounds (if any) are available. This subsection should be removed once all bugs that affect the entity have been fixed.

Civilopedia entry

This section is a copy of the in-game Civilopedia (or Great Library, in the Call to Power games) that is presented for reference. It should be presented exactly as it appears within the game, though the wiki's admins reserve the right to fix obvious mechanical errors and make a note of these changes.

Trivia

This section is used to share information about the entity that doesn't pertain to its use in the game, such as the real-world inspiration for its in-game model. It should be presented as a bulleted list.

Gallery/Images

This section is used for concept art, promotional images, and screenshots that depict the entity and are not used in its infobox.

Videos

This section is used to post videos of the entity that have been uploaded to the wiki. If there's more than one video in the article, they should be placed in a gallery (i.e., between the <gallery> and </gallery> elements).

Notes

This section is used for notations that are peripherally related to something mentioned in the article, such as content that's added as DLC.

References

This section is used to cite any websites or print media that are quoted or used as sources of information in the article. It should use either the <references /> element or the Reflist template.

External links

This section is used to share websites that fall outside this wiki's scope (most commonly news articles and forum posts) and are related to the entity.

Page naming conventions

You should follow the naming conventions set in the game in question. Where that's not an option, use sentence case (i.e., don't begin words with capital letters if they could also appear in text without them). So, since the games usually write the units as "Siege Worm" you should use that instead of "Siege worm" as the page name. It is advisable to create a redirect from the latter to the former. However, if you were to create a strategy guide on killing Siege Worms, you should name it to something like "Strategy guide on killing Siege Worms" instead of "Strategy Guide On Killing Siege Worms".

You should soon notice that we have many "overview pages" that briefly cover buildings, units, wonders, etc., that appear in more than one game, and by contrast we have pages that deal with those in relation to just one game at a time (e.g., Settler (Civ4)). When creating new pages, please follow that arrangement so that other users can easily predict what page name to look for if checking whether there is a page they want. Some of the earliest-created pages do not follow the current model. Use "Move" or "Rename" (found in the drop-down menu under "Edit") to change a page name when necessary.

Also, please do create redirects from alternative spellings and capitalizations to the actual content page. For example, Composite bowman (Civ5) is a redirect to Composite Bowman (Civ5).

Pluralization

For individual entities, singular names are preferred and plural names should redirect to the actual content page. For more general articles (e.g., those about units and buildings within a game and the relevant mechanics), the singular form should remain the standard and the plural form should redirect to the "List of <entities> in CivX" article, or to (the "List of <entities>" section of) the actual content page if no list article exists.

NB: "Civilizations" is an exception to this rule, as an article named "Civilization (Civ6)" might mislead users into thinking it focused on the sixth game in the Civilization series rather than the playable nations, empires, and cultural groups in Civilization VI. Therefore, articles that list the civilizations within a game should be called either "Civilizations (CivX)" or "List of civilizations in CivX" instead. "Leaders" is another exception, because a unit with that name exists in Civilization III (and a Great Person with a similar name exists in the Civilization Revolution games).

Civilization naming conventions

Main page: Forum:Nations - articles

As per a standard set by Robin Patterson in 2010, articles about civilizations should use the adjective form of the civilization's name (i.e., the one that would appear before "people"). Alternative names for both the civilization and its people should redirect to this article.

Image naming conventions

Images meant to be shown in an infobox should be named accordingly to the primary article they are meant for. This way the templates can find the images automatically. For example, if you have an article called Heavy Chariot (Civ6), you should also have an image called File:Heavy Chariot (Civ6).png. Template:Unit (Civ6) will then find that image automatically based on the page name and attach it to the infobox automatically.

Do not upload images with names such as "Warrior.png" because they cannot be disambiguated automatically. Instead, if the image is from, say, Civilization Revolution, upload it as "Warrior (CivRev).png", or if it is from Civilization III upload it as "Warrior (Civ3).png".

In other circumstances: TBA

Scenario naming conventions

Articles about items in scenarios should be kept separate from the articles about the base game items. This is done by creating a "pseudo-namespace" for scenarios, that is, a kind of "hierarchy" of articles. An example illustrates this the best:

Scenario article: Scenario Name (Civ6)
An article in that scenario: Scenario Name (Civ6)/Janissary
A file in that scenario: File:Scenario Name (Civ6)/Janissary.png
Main scenario category: Category:Scenario Name (Civ6)
A category in that scenario: Category:Scenario Name (Civ6)/Units

This should help users to tell at a glance that the article concerns a certain scenario and not the base game.

Links

Links should point to the most relevant article with the most accurate suffix. This means that in an article that is about Civilization V, you should link to Settler (Civ5) instead of linking to Settler. If you are an experienced editor, there are link templates that can help you do this automatically. Do add links to items that should have an article, even if they don't have it yet! It makes the link red, but red links are just an invitation for editors to write more articles. Even better, write the article by yourself after creating a link to it.

The primary purpose of redirects is to help users find pages more easily when they search the wiki, so both piped links and the Link template should point to the actual content page rather than a redirect page whenever possible.

NB: The page name should not include links when it is repeated in an article's intro - such links belong in the See also section instead.

Discussion

We have the facility for discussion forums for any matter not confined to a particular page. You can use the wall of another contributor for a quick specific question or comment, but if the answer might help other users a forum is better because it's easier to find and categorize.

The talk page linked to each article or category is a good place to discuss anything specific to that article or category, and each user's wall is for sending messages to that user (though anyone can read them).

A relatively new feature of Fandom sites is the user blog. That is a piece written by a user, which other users can comment on but not edit. Your blog could be a good place to post your own game reports! Then others can ask about why you chose particular tactics or strategies and you can explain in a reply to the comment. You can categorize blog posts as with most other pages, to help people find posts related to specific subjects.

Featured articles

TBA

Notice

The Manual of Style is a living document that will be continually updated as new games are released and the scope of the wiki changes. If you have any questions about or would like to recommend changes to the Manual of Style, either start a thread on the talk page or contact one of the admins.