Help:Style guide

This is a brief guide on how to design articles for Project:Redcap, emphasizing layout and structure.

Before You Begin

Please read our article on Copyright and do not post copyrighted material to this Wiki. The moderators will remove unauthorized copyrighted material immediately.

When to Create a New Article

Before you create a new article, please check to see whether there is an existing page that covers the same or a similar topic. Use the search box, which appears in the upper-right corner of every page on Project: Redcap, to search for key words.

You can find a list of articles we'd like people to write on the Special:WantedPages page.

How to Create a New Article

The easiest way to create a new article is to click on an existing link, on any page, that links to a non-existent page. Such links appear red in most Web browsers (though this may vary according to the preferences you've set for Project:Redcap and/or your browser). You can find a list of such links on the Special:WantedPages page.

Another way to create a new article is to search for it. If the article does not exist, the search results will include a link you can use to edit (create) it.

Follow our Naming Convention

Article titles in MediaWiki are case-sensitive, with the exception of the first character. Thus, Magus and magus are the same page, but "Troupe Style" and "Troupe style" would point to different pages. It's important that we have only one article about each topic. To achieve that goal and make Project: Redcap usable, we have to adhere to a strict capitalization convention.

Our capitalization and naming rules are:

1. Capitalize proper nouns normally.
2. Capitalize the titles of books as they appear on the cover: Realms of Power: The Divine
3. Capitalize game terms as they appear in the latest edition of the rules: for example, Casting Total, Botch die, Grand Tribunal, Lesser enchanted device.
4. Prefer the singular form for nouns: Magus not "magi," Virtue not "Virtues". We make a few exceptions to this rule: for example, the Covenant concepts article because it is inherently a list of ideas contributed by fans; similarly Products is a page about many products, not just one.
5. Drop leading articles (such as "the" or "a" at the beginning of an article title) because they make pages hard to find by name
6. For titles with multiple words, capitalize the title as if it were appearing at the beginning of a normal sentence. If your article is about learning to play Ars Magica, "Learning to play" would be correct and "Learning to Play" would be incorrect (because "play" is not a proper noun and should not be capitalized)

If you follow these rules, it will be easy for other writers to link to your article. If you don't follow them, a moderator will probably re-name your article.

Dealing with Name Collisions

Name collisions occur as soon as two or more pages claim the same name. This is particularly probable for simple words that bear two or more in-game meanings. Name collisions are also likely for common names that have different meanings in different contexts, such as »Bonisagus« — a term that applies to the singular person, the denotation of the House, as well as any member of that House.

The suggested procedure to deal with name collisions is as follows:

1. At first, keep page names as simple as possible, and try to avoid additional specifiers where possible.
2. When this is not possible any more, a page fork should be performed that creates two or more additional pages.

For example, the page »John« might be split into »John (actor)« and »John (writer)«. While the latter two continue to grow, the former is discontinued, and contains just a list of connecting links:

The term '''John''' is ambiguous and refers to one of the following specific pages:

* [[John (actor)|The actor]]
* [[John (writer)|The writer]]

Additional links can be included as soon as the need arises. Page »John« is tagged as »Ambiguous«.

The advantage of this scheme is that

• Page »John« continues to exist.
• Referrers may remain unchanged, but can be changed at any time.
• In the former case, the reader is gently notified of the name collision.

Use Categories

Project: Redcap uses Categories to organize pages and make them discoverable. It would be a big help to us if you could include categories in your new article. The Wiki automatically maintains a list of categories on the Special:Categories page.

Please use only the existing categories. If you think we need to add a new category, please contact us or use your article's Talk page to discuss it. Although it might not be apparent, we've put quite a bit of thought into our categories and we want to think carefully before adding new ones.