Ministry of War Wiki:Manual of Style

Note: This page is a work in progress. Suggestions and comments for setting Best Practices are welcome.

This page contains Best Practices as they apply to specific issues on the MoW wiki. Proposed changes to the Best Practices should be discussed on the talk page before being migrated here. Please note that all editors are expected to observe these guidelines.

Page titles
This wiki FOLLOWS the conventional wikipedia rules for article titles. Use lowercase for all words after the first one in the page title, UNLESS the words in page name would have been capitalized if they were not otherwise part of a the page name or title. This also applies to section headings.

Links to uncreated pages (red links)
Please do not make a large number of red links unless you intend to fill in the missing content yourself. Red links are not inherently bad, especially when they point to much-needed content. Unfortunately most users do not create new pages, and editors often have differing ideas about what content should have its own page. This means that red links often stay red for a long time, or worse, the "missing" pages never get created. If you think that a relatively minor element of MoW should have its own page, back it up with content rather than creating dozens of red links and hoping that someone else will add the missing data for you.

Table guidlines
Basic "righthand" rules:
 * Please put each header and cell on its own row. This is mostly done to make it easier for new editors to add information to tables, particularly because the table is not visible in the Java interface while using the wt and wtc templates.
 * When reformatting tables to use wt and wtc please try to preserve as much of the original formatting as is reasonably practicable. Also remember to left-justify the entire table and unbold headers in the java interface before adding wt or wtc tags as this will make the table easier to edit.
 * Headers are coded with the exclamation mark ( ! )
 * Numbers and times should always be centered, even if they appear in the first column of a table.
 * Text should generally be left justified, particularly when text appears in the first column, as it makes it much easier for readers to parse texts of different lengths.
 * Exceptions: there are plenty. Use good judgment, and aim for ease of readability, then ease of editing on the backend.

Example:

!width="125"|Spell !width="525"|Information
 * China
 * This is the page for the Chinese civilization.
 * Egypt
 * This is the page for the Egyptian civilization.
 * Persia
 * This is the page for the Persian civilization.
 * }
 * Persia
 * This is the page for the Persian civilization.
 * }

What it looks like:

!width="125"|Spell !width="525"|Information
 * China
 * This is the page for the Chinese civilization.
 * Egypt
 * This is the page for the Egyptian civilization.
 * Persia
 * This is the page for the Persian civilization.
 * }
 * Persia
 * This is the page for the Persian civilization.
 * }