Manual of Style/Draft

Draft to do list

• Categories
• Civilopedia entires
• Civilization Names
• Infoboxes
• Tables
• Template tips
• Featured articles?
• Expand naming convensions
• Image coloration (When is it appropriate to photoshop an image)
• Copyright
• References
• Styles of each individual games?? CivBE has significantly different styles compared top Civ6
• Final copyedit
• Additional Ideas

Article begins

This is a basic style guide for editing and creating articles. 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 would harmonize the basic layout of each page and eliminate dispute between users regarding the content. Any questions, suggestions or complaints regarding these rules can be placed in the talk page.

Social conduct

Everyone is expected to behave themselves and to assume good faith. That is, be civil and assume that people are trying to help rather than hurt (unless, of course, faced with obvious vandalism, but even then you should still be polite towards the vandal). If it looks like an edit war might be starting, start a discussion on the article's talk page instead. No personal attacks, name calling, or anything like that. Established editors are expected not to bite the newcomers.

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 one to be created at the help desk.

Note that all new infoboxes should be of the portable variety, i.e. 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.

Article contents

Main page: Forum:Wiki_purpose_policy_proposal

• 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 when you want to provide that kind of information.
  • The "Civilopedia" 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 game is of course always welcome!

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

WIP

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 readers to tell at a glance that the article concerns a certain scenario and not the base game.

Categories

Every article should be in some category. However, since this wiki relies heavily on templates, the categories should be added using them, not manually article by article. Additionally, you should use reasonably specific categories. Tagging all Civ5 units, buildings, techs etc. with Category:Civilization V brings no value, as then that category will be filled with clutter and cannot be used for navigation (or for anything else that matter). Instead, use Category:Units (Civ5), Category:Buildings (Civ5) and Category:Technologies (Civ5), and add those categories into the main Category:Civilization V.

Example: say you've got a unit called XCOM Squad from Civilization V. That should be in Category:Units (Civ5). Now, instead of editing the XCOM Squad page and adding that category, you would edit the Template:Unit (Civ5) and have that one add the category to all pages where it is used.

If you think a template should implement a new category, but you have never edited a template or are not 100% confident with your editing skills, please open a discussion at the template's talk page or the forum. Finally, if you do end up creating a new category by yourself, please use "sentence case" (which means using capital letters only for proper nouns), then edit the new category page so that it has at least one parent category.

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.

Discussion

We have the facility for discussion forums for any matter not confined to a particular page. You can use the talk page 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 Wikia 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.