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Mass Effect Wiki:Manual of Style/Tips

From Mass Effect Wiki

These aren't hard and fast rules, but suggestions, recommendations, guidelines and assistance with style and formatting for Mass Effect Wiki articles.

Contents

[edit] General Tips

[edit] Mass Effect-specific Tips

  • Unlike most species in science fiction, the names of Mass Effect's alien races are common nouns and not capitalised. e.g. 'asari', not 'Asari'. The exceptions are the Protheans and the Reapers.
  • Because Shepard can be either male or female, try to avoid using 'him' or 'her' to keep the article gender-neutral. The exception is when discussing romances e.g. "If Commander Shepard is male, he can have a relationship with Ashley Williams", as this is the only area where gender makes any real difference.
  • If you’re adding something about background that's not in the Codex or source material, please stick a link in there or a mention of the source so we know where it's coming from. Try to only add background from a trusted source.
  • Mass Effect Wiki has several guides on weapons and classes, and several adversary articles have tactics as well. Expand these as much as you like, but try to keep them impersonal (don't use "I tried this and it worked great!!") Comments, ideas and personal input should go on the Talk page for that article.
  • The spoiler tag should be used before any major plot revelations. This allows people who haven't finished the game to use the wiki as well - someone coming for the Adept Guide might not want to know all about Saren Arterius just yet. Preferably, add big revelations to the bottom of articles just in case. Some articles are pretty much one big spoiler (Conduit, Indoctrination) so the tag is at the top.

[edit] Spelling

A quick spellcheck before saving your edit is greatly appreciated. If you don't have a spellcheck add-on in your browser, preview the article first and read it through to check for any mistakes.

[edit] British or American Spelling?

Mass Effect Wiki has editors from both the US and the UK, so there are sometimes questions over which spelling is 'correct'. Both of them are. However Mass Effect is written in American English, which means equipment articles like 'Human Armor' have American spelling. So if you're using that article title in a page, it might look odd to have both English and American spelling (e.g. the sentence "Mass Effect has several types of armour, including Human Armor and Quarian Armor" looks a bit strange). The rule of thumb is: either spelling is 'correct', so don't correct 'English English' unnecessarily.

[edit] Templates

Mass Effect Wiki uses templates extensively to avoid the tedium of needing to make dozens (or hundreds!) of changes to standardized markup and text.

See also: Mass Effect Wiki:Templates

[edit] Redirects

Redirects are usually created when a page is moved (i.e. renamed): the original page is given a redirect. This is accomplished automatically by replacing the old page with one which just contains the text 

#REDIRECT [[NewPageName]]

For example the Geth Stalker article redirects to the Geth Hopper page.

It is also entirely possible to manually create such pages using the #REDIRECT directive. This can be useful since such pages will show up in searches and can provide sensible aliases (e.g. Shepard redirects to Commander Shepard). This also provides a convenient way to naturally add links to wiki pages without needing to resort to [[actual link|visible text]]. However, please refrain from creating large numbers of aliases which are not likely to ever be needed. (Note also that the wiki automatically understands markup like [[turian]]s, rendering the whole thing as 'turians'.)

[edit] Categories

Categories help other users find things. The categories on the Mass Effect Wiki are organized into a tree which is rooted by Category:Browse. To change the parents of a category, simply edit the category page and add or remove [[Category:SomeCategoryName]] links.

To add any wiki page to a category, simply add [[Category:SomeCategoryName]] to the page (by convention, at the end). A page can be a member of any number of categories. Once the page is saved, the categories which it is in will appear at the bottom of the page.

If you are creating a new category, the category page itself needs to be created. When creating the page, include a brief description of the purpose of the category, the category template, and add the category itself to any parent categories. For example, 

This is an example of a [[Special:Categories|category]] page.

{{category}}

[[Category:Browse]]
[[Category:Help]]

[edit] Screenshots

Good, clear screenshots are always welcome, preferably with the subtitles turned off. You can upload images here. Don't forget to add a quick summary of the image content to make it easier to find later. Even better, also add the image page itself to any appropriate categories (by adding links like, for example, [[Category:Locations]]). If you're adding an image to a page, make it large enough to see clearly or use a thumbnail - in the latter case, add a quick summary of the image as well. See more on uploading images here.

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