Nintendo Wiki:Manual of Style

This Manual of Style outlines a standard of clean, consistent formatting for articles on the Nintendo Wiki. The formatting described here is a guideline and can be overridden where circumstances warrant it. These guidelines will never be unerringly perfect for every situation. However, please try your best to keep to the advice outlined in this article so others may use your edits as an example when creating and editing their own articles.

These guidelines are a summary of the most important guidelines for the Nintendo Wiki, but a more expansive set of guidelines can be found on Wikipedia at Wikipedia Manual of Style.

Grammar and punctuation
When writing articles it is important to follow these rules of the English language:
 * 1) Don't use netspeak or any similar slang. We are compiling a professional resource for Nintendo gamers.
 * 2) Keep your writing around a sixth-grade reading level. You don't need to fill it with big words just to make it sound smarter, especially if you're not certain how the word should be used.
 * 3) Vary your words. When writing, try to vary the words you use and the length of your sentences. It makes things sound more interesting.
 * 4) Capitalize words when appropriate. (see below)
 * 5) Use correct punctuation. This includes commas, periods, quotation marks, and apostrophes. (see below)
 * 6) Know the difference between homophones: there, their, and they're; here and hear; it's and its; who's and whose.

Capitalization
In naming an article, the first letter must always be capitalized due to technical restrictions; there is no way to not capitalize it, the system will do it for you. It should be like this anyway, except in the case of a brand name that begins with a small letter, such as iMac, iPod or eBay.

If the name of the article is a name, such as Nintendo Co., Ltd., The Pokémon Company, or Ash Ketchum, all letters which begin a new word should be capitalized. If the article has another word that is not the name of a person or specific name of a place, company, organization, or creature, but still uses a name, format it like John Smith's apples, not capitalizing "apples". So, unless there is a reason for capitalization, don't do it. Generally, just follow what you learned in school; also, do not capitalize words like of, the, or, if, in, or and.

If an article name includes parentheses/brackets, it is asked that the content within said brackets, unless capitalized for good reason, be put in lowercase.

Use of accented "e" ("é")
Names of things which should contain an "é," should use the "é" rather than an "e;" For example, it should be Pokémon, not Pokemon.

It should also be noted that "Pokeball," "Pokéball," or "PokéBall" are all improper variations of the word "Poké Ball.

Punctuation
In addition to basic punctuation, it is important to know how to punctuate titles. Titles are always either in italics or inside quotation marks.

English style
As Nintendo-related media is localized primarily in the United States, spelling and punctuation must be used over. Exceptions are made if the Commonwealth spelling is the official spelling. For names of articles that have spellings which may vary in other forms of English, a redirect may be created for such spellings.

Here are some examples of American English vs. British English:
 * American: color, realize, recognize, honor, and behavior
 * British: colour, realise, recognise, honour and behaviour

Pronouns
In order to remain as professional and encyclopedic as possible, please refrain from using second-person pronouns such as "you" and "your". Instead, address them as "the player" or use the passive voice instead of directly addressing the reader.

Neutral point of view
When adding content to pages, please ensure that it adheres to a neutral point of view, as this wiki bases on confirmed fact, rather than theories and fan opinions.

While the Nintendo Wiki primarily uses American English, it still assumes English-language reading ability, not the location of the reader. Therefore, refrain from using terms in articles such as "overseas", "abroad", and "foreign" to refer to Japan and phrases such as "here in the west" and "over in Japan", and colloquially referring to Pokémon's audience in Japan as "the Japanese". Neutral phrases such as "outside of Japan", "Japanese audiences", or "in western countries" are preferred.

Bold
The first time the name of the article is used in an article, and only the first time, it should be printed in bold text (done by surrounding the name with ''' on each side). Also, if there is two names referring to the same thing for the article, both should be bolded for the first time. So, for example, if the articles name was "Pikachu" then, in the article, the first paragraph would go like this:

Pikachu is an Electric-type Pokémon and the mascot of the Pokémon franchise.

Which, when coded in an article, the above would look like this:



When naming an article, one should always consider some things:

Italics
Italics are used for large works like games, movies, comics, book, and even series (e.g. Pokémon series). For example, Super Smash Bros. Brawl must be italicized because it is a game.

To use italics, place two single quote marks before and after the title:
 * Pokémon

These are single quotes ('), not double quotes ("). Alternately, highlight the title you want to put in italics with your mouse and click the "I" button in the toolbar above the edit box (in between the B for bolding and AB for the Internal link).

The above rule does not apply to headlines. For episodes and manga chapters, double quotes (") should be used instead.

Links
To link to another article inside the Nintendo Wiki, you must put around it. To link to an article in Wikipedia, use and put the article title inside. If an article does not exist by that name, the link will show up as dark red, like #CC2200. External links will show up as blue.

You only need to link to another page once in any given article. Most of the time this is the first time that article's title comes up, but there are some exceptions to this.


 * Examples
 * Pikachu
 * the Wikipedia entry for the franchise.

Please do not make unnecessary links to pages that do not exist. This will only clutter the list of broken links. This applies to any page, be it a blog, forum, article etc. In addition, it is not recommended to link words in a headline.

Images
A user can upload any image they feel is necessary to be placed into the articles of the wiki. However, there are rules to uploading images to the site.

Uploaded images can be of box arts, gameplay, menus, artwork, sprites, television show screen-shots, card images, etc. However, since this is a fact-based wiki, fan-made content will be removed if the image(s) are used in articles. When uploading images, please be cautious of whether that image is necessary or not. Fanon images can be only be uploaded to the wiki if you keep them to your userpage. Images uploaded to the wiki also need to have a license added to them, preferably by the uploader.

To upload an image to the wiki, use either Special:Upload. These pages should include a summary box as well. It is asked of the community that users should upload their images with summaries including what game/episode/etc. the image is of/from as well as what is going on in the image or what the image portrays.

Image licensing
As mentioned above, images uploaded are to be licensed. A complete list can be found on MediaWiki:Licenses, which is displayed on Special:Upload. Here are a few examples:

Many templates used on Nintendo Wiki have a fair use license. What this means is that the uploaded image is subject to copyright, but that United States copyright law allows free use of it for documentation purposes so long as no profit is derived from its use. More information can be found on Wikipedia's article.
 * Fairuse

Examples of fair use templates:
 * game-screenshot
 * game-sprite
 * character-artwork


 * Other examples:
 * cc-by-sa-3.0 shows that the uploaded image is licensed under the Creative Commons License.
 * pd shows that the uploaded file has been released into the public domain, and is unaffected by most licensing laws.

Image categorizing
Uploaded images are to include not only the aforementioned summaries and licensing, but also are to include categories as well. Although adding the necessary category or categories to the image via the initial upload summary is ideal, any category can be added to the image's page any time afterward. Newly added categories featured on file pages are to include the same pattern of categories listed. The category or categories added to an image primarily should feature only the important elements of the image.

The category naming should be done in correspondence to each other. The licensing template used on the images automatically adds in a category, so there's no need to add unneeded coding for those categories to the page. All images are to be uploaded featuring a category, or if an image doesn't belong into a content image category, an appropriate category should be found in the image category.

Images in articles
The primary use of images is to illustrate the wiki's articles. When adding an image into an article, make sure that the image(s) must be placed in the right spots so pages don't see messy or out of place. If an image overlaps a header, make sure to use br.

Primarily, each page has an infobox, and in said infobox is an image depicting the article's subject – this image is typically a box art or artwork of an item or character. In addition to the image used in an infobox, images can be placed into sections of the article by primarily using either /  to align the image, or   to add a caption with the file link. Don't forget to use  when adding an image as well, replacing the "number" variable with the appropriate number.

In addition to using them like that, images can also appear in articles by way of galleries. Galleries should be the most prominent for of image usage on articles. Image galleries should only be used on pages in the following format:

Image galleries should only be placed at the bottom of the article, above the "Names in other Languages," "Trivia," "External links," and "References" sections.