GuildWiki:Style and formatting/Skills

This article provides information on starting, expanding on and completing articles relating to individual skills articles in Guild Wars. This information should be taken into account along with the more general information in Style and formatting. For information about using the skill templates rather than the articles, see Skill templates.

Anatomy of a skill article
Every skill article contains at least the template for that skill. The template should be placed at the beginning of the article only preceded by other templates such as Template:Skill-stub or Template:Cleanup. The skill template will produce a "fake" heading named "skill details;" place the skill's description, skill box, and progression (if applicable) into the page; and perform most, if not all, of the necessary categorization for the article (except when the template has "nocats = yes" set, see Skill templates).

After the skill template there may be additional sections for acquisition, notes, trivia, related skills, and related articles (in that order). As per normal S&F guidelines, all headings should be lowercase besides the first letter. Any of these sections may be omitted if there is no information to place in them. Normal skills that players can use may have all of these sections but a monster-only skill will likely not have many of them.

Acquisition
The acquisition section should contain: Please keep to the order above.
 * A list of all quests which grant the skill upon acceptance or upon completion.
 * A list of skill trainers and hero skill trainers that offer the skill:
 * For Prophecies, all skill trainers that offer the skill.
 * For Factions, all skill trainers before Michiko in Kaineng Center that offer the skill and the first trainer afterwards (from Michiko forward).
 * For Nightfall, all skill trainers before Tohn in Kamadan that offer the skill, the first trainer afterwards (from Tohn forward), and all hero skill trainers.
 * All bosses the skill can be captured from.
 * A note if the skill is given when switching secondary professions.

"Appropriate" bosses for non-elite skills are all bosses that can reasonably be encountered before the skill is available via other means. For example, in Prophecies, Aftershock can be captured in several locations before it is ever available at a skill trainer.

If a boss is only spawned while a particular quest is active, add the name of the quest next to the boss name, in the format " (zone name, during quest name) ":

For core skills, the various means of acquisition should be broken down by campaign. For non-core skills, this is almost always unnecessary.

Here's an example acquisition section body for an imaginary core skill with many means of acquisition:

Here's an example imaginary elite non-core skill:

Note that the campaign and empty headings are omitted.

Trivia
The trivia section contains information tangentially related to the skill in terms of the game. This might include information about the origin of the skill's name or icon.

Related skills
The related skills section should be a short list of related skills. These skills should not simply share a common characteristic such as "knocks down" or "strikes multiple times" but instead be skills which might be interchangeable with the article's skill under many situations or otherwise serve a very similar purpose. The related skills section should not exceed having more then 5 skills listed, if it does, a quick reference should be created.

Each skill should have:
 * A bullet point before it.
 * Encased in the skill icon template.
 * Elite skills should end with (elite).
 * Duplicate skills should end with (duplicate).

Note: Many "Related skills" lists currently capitalize "elite" and thus do not follow the Use lower case policy. These instances should be changed to lower case when seen or when making other edits to the article.

Example: {| border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0"
 * Wikitext || Output
 * Wikitext || Output

Related skills

 * (elite)
 * (duplicate)
 * (duplicate)

Related skills

 * (elite)
 * (duplicate)
 * (duplicate)
 * }

Related articles
The related article section should be a list of non-skill articles that are particularly relevant to the article's skill. For example, Animate Bone Minions's related articles contains links to Animate minion quick reference, Bone Minions, Corpse Exploitation, General minion mastery guide and Minions.

Categories
Any categories should be added at the very end of skill articles.

For normal player skills, almost all categorization is handled by the skill template. Only Category:Duplicate skills, Category:Mantras, Category:Pet skills, Category:Storms, and Category:Touch skills need be manually added.

For other skills, all categories need be manually added. However, to keep these skills separate from player skills (so as to not dilute the the categories by adding skills that cannot be used and are generally not of interest to people browsing the categories), skills that are PvE-only or not usable by players should only be placed in categories which are in Category:Special skills.

Example
Here's the wikitext for Shock as an example:

Acquisition
Skill Trainers:
 * Mazzim (Fishermen's Haven)
 * Tengsao (The Amnoon Oasis)
 * Dakk (Ember Light Camp)

Skill stubs
Skill articles should be placed into Category:Skill stubs by adding Template:Skill-stub to the article if it fails to meet any of these requirements:
 * Follows the guidelines in this article
 * Has a skill template with a description, stats, and icon

In addition, player skills have the following additional requirements:
 * Has progression data in the skill template (where applicable)
 * Has an acquisition section with at least one skill trainer for each campaign it is available in (for non-elite skills)
 * Has an acquisition section with at least one boss capture (for elite skills)

For the skill trainer requirement, skill trainers in "training" areas such as Shing Jea Island or Istan (besides Kamadan) do not count.

Skill templates
For information about the various skill templates can be found at Skill templates.