GuildWiki:Style and formatting

This article covers information on proper style and formatting rules. For formatting of individual sections please see the links below.

The GuildWiki is a project to document and organize the world of Guild Wars as effectively as possible in the form of a wiki. Everyone is welcome to contribute! An important part of creating such an exhaustive source of information is ensuring that the content is delivered in a pleasing and consistent manner. In order to achieve this, the GuildWiki community has worked to produce some standards on the format of the wiki. As they currently stand these standards are not set in stone, but they are considered 'good policy' and are recommended guidelines. If you have any suggestions for improving the standards please discuss them on the talk page before implementing them.

Getting started
Articles can generally describe
 * an object, such as an item or weapon
 * a Non-Player Character, either friendly or hostile
 * a location
 * a guide on how to do something, such as a quest or mission
 * a collection of all of the above in a category

All are welcome to update the wiki. But before you write your article, it's best to double check that an article does not already exist on the subject. You can do so by making use of the search bar on the left. If you are unsure, make use of the discussion link that appears at the top of every article, allowing you to discuss that article.

If you click on a red link you will be prompted with the choice to start writing a new article on the subject. You can also start a new article by clicking on the "edit" link at the top of an article with no content. For an understanding of the wiki code necessary to format a page please read the editing guide.

Unknown information
In some cases, you won't have all the information at hand. If this is the case, please do not fill in information with guesses or approximations. No information at all is better than inaccurate information! This is especially true for numerical details, such as damage ranges, but might not always apply to descriptions. If you can only remember an approximate description then in most cases this may suffice, but please use your discretion.

Please omit sections that you do not have the information about. For example, most skills should have an "Acquisition" section. If you don't know how to acquire a given skill, then please do not fill in this section with "to be completed" or "unknown". Instead, simply leave the section out and readers will understand that this information is not yet known.

Article naming
Whenever applicable, the exact wording and capitalization should match whatever is used by the game. If it is more common among players to use a different name than the official in-game name, make the player-slang a redirect.

Disambiguating article names
When multiple things have the same name but are to be placed in different articles, use disambiguation tags, like this: Name (disambiguation tag). The disambiguation tags should be sufficiently specific to distinguish each article sharing the same name, but no more specific than necessary.

If the popularity/usage/commonality of one of the things that compete for the same name overwhelmingly dominates the others, its article may simply be named as Name without disambiguation.

In all cases, the Name article should contain, at the very top of the page, links to all the Name (disambiguation tag) articles.

Format and style
The following sections are brief summaries of some common formatting and styling issues.

General notes
When working on an article, there are some points to consider. Try to think about whether this article topic is too generic. If the topic of the article you are working on is too generic then it is likely to grow extremely large. To avoid this try splitting the article up into its constituent parts. For example, an article on humans in Guild Wars doesn't need to contain details of every human in the game. Looking at the headings of sections in an article is a good indication of how the article can be split up.

Linking
When writing an article, linking to the current article from itself will embolden the text within the link. For example Style and formatting in any other article will produce a link, but in this article it will appear bolded like this: Style and formatting. After discussion, it has been decided that linking to articles from within articles is preferable, as it produces semantically accurate documents.

When making links to other articles, it's best to only link the first instance of a word for each section or portion of the article. So if you are talking about skills, then don't link to that page every time you repeat the word 'skills'. Only repeat the link in a different section that's considerably further down the page from the initial link. This also applies when making 'recursive' links, or links from the current article to the current article, as in the above example.

Upper and lower case
When in doubt, use lower case. This includes in article headings, article titles, and category names.

Boxes
Many articles that discuss an object or character in the game make use of boxes. At the moment only the skill box had been rigorously standardised, but items, weapons and creatures are currently undergoing a similar process. In order to avoid confusion, the following colors should be used:

 * These colors are suggested.

When designing new boxes, try to pick colors that differ as much as possible from those already in place, but are still light enough that you can read black text on top of it. You can find a list of color names at Help:Color.

Structure and organization
The following sections provide general guidelines on the structure and organization of an article.

Introductory text
Articles should not begin with a subsection containing general descriptions. Such introductory text should be in "section 0" of the article, that is, the top of the article before any section headings. Such text will be displayed at the top of an article, before the table of contents (if there is one). Articles should generally not begin with sections.

Categorization
Category tags should be placed at the end of an article. Since the automatically generated category links appear at the bottom of a page, it is logical for the category tags to also be located at the bottom of the page text for consistency.

For specific guidelines on the categorization of different types of articles, see the relevant Style and Formatting sub-article. Note that many of the infobox and navbox templates used on this wiki will automatically add pertinent categories to articles that include them, and these categories should not be explicitly tagged in the article itself.

Ordering
The order of different elements within an article help maintain consistency across articles of the same nature.
 * Sections: Follow the order and names specified in the appropriate guidelines.
 * Professions: Warrior, ranger, monk, necromancer, mesmer, elementalist, assassin, ritualist, paragon, dervish (in the order they appear on the character creation screen).

Other notes

 * When archiving keep to Page_name/Archive_X, X being the number
 * When documenting availability (of quests, items, skills etc), use the name of the campaign (Prophecies, Factions, etc.) instead of the name of the continent that most/all of the Campaign take place on. Use continent names only when discussing lore or geography.