Style Guide

This article aims to provide a comprehensive style guide for all Minr Wiki articles to follow. There are often disputes over which style rule or formatting to use and hopefully the inclusion of an official style guide will help resolve these disputes as well as in helping to reach a consensus.

Although Wikipedia already provides a more general style guide, a more specific one is necessary for Minr specific guidelines. As such, only guidelines pertaining to the Minr Wiki and its basic formatting rules should be included here.

Notability

Articles are only allowed in the main namespace if they fit the following criteria. Articles which do not fit the criteria may be deleted without notice.

General

1. Articles must contain enough information to warrant a full page. If they do not have enough content, they should be merged with other similar articles.
2. Articles must pertain directly to Minr in some way.
3. Maps not currently accessible to all players on "Zero" should not have their own page.

Wiki rules

Parody, comedic, nonsense, hoax, and speculation articles, or any other article that could mislead players are not allowed to be created.

Articles created for the purpose of advertising specific servers or other products are not allowed.

Articles about fan communities are not allowed due to advertising issues.

Articles in the "User:" namespace are exempt from the notability guidelines. They can be used for anything, provided they follow the other wiki rules.

Redirects

Redirects are exempt from the normal notability, but must redirect to an article that fits the notability guidelines. If a redirect leads to another wiki, it must use {{soft redirect}}. Redirects can be created if they fit one of the following:

1. Alternate spelling of the title, such as "Armour" for "Armor".
   1. Incorrect spelling, typos, and irregular formatting are not allowed.
2. Alternate or shortened name, provided the name is common usage, such as "Log" for "Wood".
3. Previous article title, including if the article was moved to another wiki.
   1. An exception is if the previous title was not commonly used.
4. Alternate capitalization or form, including changing the title to plural case.
5. A part of a merged or multi-topic article, such as a potion or a mentioned feature.

Redirects in the user namespace may lead anywhere, except to an article that does not exist or another redirect.

Article titles

Article titles should be in the singular form to maintain consistency.

Articles should follow a general naming format based on the type.

• Articles about blocks, items, and entities in game should use the in game name capitalized as it appears in game.
  • If the feature does not have an in game name, it should follow the same format as other articles of the same type. For example, the mob Spider Jockey.
  • If the article is about multiple things in the game, the title should equally represent all the titles. For example, an article about wooden and iron doors would be called Door.
• Disambiguation articles should only contain "(disambiguation)" if the title without the word is used by an article.
• If the article's type is unlisted, it should use the most relevant title in sentence case, not title case, unless it is a proper noun.

Writing

As this wiki's purpose is to document facts, you should always avoid speculative and unsourced information. Generally speaking, information does not require sources if they can directly be seen in-game or are otherwise obvious. Other information however, such as quotes from staff and information that is not widely known, must be sourced with a proper reference. The {{citation needed}} template should be placed after any information that requires a source. Do not add content to an article if you cannot find a proper source.

Articles in the main namespace should always be written in the third-person perspective and without terms referential to the reader. Try not to use abbreviations of words either. For instance, sentences like "You shouldn't come close to creepers because they'll explode and kill you." should be written as "The player should not come close to creepers as they will explode, potentially killing the player.".

To emphasize points, italics should be used, not bold or ALL CAPS.

Keeping articles concise and up to date

In short, articles should only contain information that is up to date, i.e., implemented in the latest full version of the game. Anything that is outdated should be moved to the History section of the article. When something changes, note the change in the History section and remove the outdated information from other sections of the article. It is unnecessary to mention when a particular feature was implemented; this is once again reserved for the History section of the article. Sentences such as "Trading, which was implemented in 1.3.1, is a feature that allows players to exchange emeralds (previously rubies) for other items." should be written as "Trading is a feature that allows players to exchange emeralds for other items."

Grammar

Pages on the wiki can either use American English or "British English". However, the same must be used throughout an entire article.

Capitalization

In-game items should be treated as common nouns and as such should not be capitalized, unless they start a new sentence. This includes fictional items, such as prismarine. Proper nouns, however, such as the Nether or the Overworld should always be capitalized.

Section headings

Article main sections should start with level 2 headers (two equal signs) and increase by one for subsections. Never use level 1 headers (one equal sign). Follow sentence style capitalization, not title style, so only the first letter of the heading and proper nouns are capitalized.

There should be one space between sections as well as one space between the equal signs and the section name for ease of editing. If any "main article" links or thumb images are used, place them immediately under the section header, and then a space after those before the section content.

For information on which sections should be in which order, see the Article layout section of this style guide.

Italics

Any instance of "Minr" should be in italics. Any emphasis (in talk pages, etc.) should be in italics instead of being in bold or uppercase letters. Any instance of the name of a videogame should also be in italics. For instance: Team Fortress 3.

Images

When adding screenshots to an article, make sure the screenshots use vanilla textures and UI. Screenshots that use custom texturepacks, UI mods and other custom content are not allowed.

Image captions should not have periods at the end, unless the phrase is a full sentence.

Images added to articles should fit the following guidelines:

• Images should showcase an attribute of the article's topic.
  • Images should not show unintended strange or humorous behavior, such as mobs "sitting" on stairs.
  • Images should not have the sole purpose of showcasing a bug.
  • Images showcasing usage of specific features for decoration should be avoided.
• Articles should only have one image showcasing an individual attribute of the articles content. For example, a zombie wearing armor.
• Images should showcase the most up to date version of Minecraft available for the content.
  • Images that are outdated are subject to be removed.

Linking

For a complete guide to linking, please refer to Wikipedia's Manual of Style for links.

The use of links is a difficult balance between providing the reader enough useful links to allow them to "wander through" articles and excessive linking which can distract them from their reading flow.

Underlinking can cause the reader to become frustrated because questions may arise about the article's contents which can only be resolved by using the search option or other sources for clarification, interrupting and distracting the reader.

Overlinking may distract the reader because links are usually colored differently causing the eye to shift focus constantly. Additionally, if the same word is linked multiple times in the same paragraph it can cause the reader to question if the links are directing them to different articles or not.

The guidelines for linking are:

• No more than 10 percent of the words in an article are contained in links.

• Unless it affects the sentence's wording and readability in a negative way, two links should not be next to each other in the text so that it looks like one link.

• Links for any single term should not be excessively repeated in the same article. Excessive linking is defined as multiple use of the same term, in a line or a paragraph, which will almost certainly appear needlessly on the viewer's screen. Remember, the purpose of links is to direct the reader to a new spot at the point(s) where the reader is most likely to take a temporary detour due to needing more information.

• Duplicating an important link distant from a previous occurrence in an article may well be appropriate. If an important term appears many times in a long article, but is only linked once at the very beginning of the article, it may actually be underlinked. Indeed, readers who jump directly to a subsection of interest must still be able to find a link. But take care in fixing such problems, the distance between duplicate links is an editor's preference, however if in doubt duplicate the term further down the article.

Linking to a redirect is preferred over using a piped link except in templates and other pages that will be transcluded. When a piped link is unavoidable, it should not point to a redirect. If a redirect can be avoided using a suffix on the link, that is preferred. E.g. Using [[Creeper]]s instead of [[Creepers]] is desired.

Date formatting

The Minecraft Wiki is an international community. That is a good thing in general, but it makes a problem for numeric abbreviations of dates, such as "12/10/11": while most countries abbreviate dates as day/month/year, some Asian countries use year/month/day, and the US uses month/day/year. So the above date could represent any of three different dates. To avoid this problem, most dates should be written in "Month DD, YYYY" format, e.g. "December 10, 2011". Do not use superscripts or suffixes such as "April 23^rd" or "4th of May". If a numeric or terse date is needed (such as in a table), then use YYYY-MM-DD, always with 2 digits for month and day (e.g., 2011-12-10 or 2012-05-04). Besides being the ISO standard, dates in this format will naturally sort properly, say if the table column is later made sortable.

Article layout

For the sake of consistency, all articles of a specific type should follow a general layout.

• <TO DO>

If an article does not contain a layout currently, one can be proposed on the talk page otherwise, attempt to use a layout that follows a similar style to an existing layout.