Help:Style Guide

This is the style guide for all NORWiki articles. This page covers certain topics in full, and presents the key points of others. Other Help pages have further details for the style of specific pages within NORWiki.

This guide is NORWiki's house style. It helps editors write articles with consistent, clear, and precise language, layout, and formatting. The goal is to make Wikipedia easier and more intuitive to use. Consistency in language, style, and formatting promotes clarity and cohesion. Writing should be clear and concise. Plain English works best: avoid ambiguity, jargon, and vague or unnecessarily complex wording.

Article Titles, Headings and Sections

Article Titles

A title should be recognizable (as a name or description of the topic), natural, sufficiently precise, concise, and consistent with the titles of related articles. If these criteria are in conflict, they need to be balanced against one another.

The following should be considered when creating a title for an article:

• Use "title case," not "sentence case"; that is, when writing a title, you should only use capital letters for the principal words. Do not use capital letters for prepositions, articles or conjunctions unless one is the first word.
  • Examples:
  • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
  • Dark Age of Camelot
• Do not use A, An, or The as the first word, unless by convention it is an inseparable part of a name or it is part of the title of a work (A Clockwork Orange).
• Titles should normally be nouns or noun phrases: EverQuest, not In EverQuest.
• The final visible character should not be a punctuation mark unless it is part of a name, or an abbreviation, or a closing round bracket or quotation mark is required.

Section Organization

An article should begin with an introductory lead section, which does not contain section headings. The remainder is divided into sections, each with a section heading that can be nested in a hierarchy. If there are at least four section headings in the article, a navigable table of contents is generated automatically and displayed between the lead and the first heading.

Section Headings

Equal signs are used to mark the enclosed text as a section heading: ==Title== for a primary section; ===Title=== for the next level (a subsection); and so on to the lowest-level subsection, with =====Title=====. (The highest heading level technically possible is =Title=; but do not use it in articles, because it is reserved for the page title.)

Spaces between the equal signs and the heading text are optional, and will not affect the way the heading is displayed. The heading must be typed on a separate line. Include one blank line above the heading, and optionally one blank line below it, for readability in the edit window.

The provisions in Article titles (above) generally apply to section headings as well (for example, headings are in title case, not sentence case). The following points apply specifically to section headings:

• Headings should not refer redundantly to the subject of the article, or to higher-level headings.
• Headings should not normally contain links, especially where only part of a heading is linked.
• Section and subsection headings should preferably be unique within a page; otherwise section links may lead to the wrong place, and automatic edit summaries can be ambiguous.
• Citations should not be placed within or on the same line as section and subsection headings.
• Headings should not contain images.
• Headings should not contain questions.

Before changing a section heading, consider whether you might be breaking existing links to that section. If there are many links to the old section title, create an anchor with that title to ensure that the links still work.

Capital Letters

Title case rather than sentence case is used in Wikipedia article titles and section headings; see Article titles and Section headings above.

Do Note Use Capitals for Emphasis

Do not use capital letters for emphasis; where wording alone cannot provide the emphasis, use italics.

Incorrect: It is not only a LITTLE (or Little) learning that is dangerous.

Correct: It is not only a little learning that is dangerous.

Capitalization of "The"

Generally do not capitalize the definite article in the middle of a sentence: an article about the Lich King (not about The Lich King). However there are some conventional exceptions, including most titles of artistic works: Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings (but Homer wrote the Odyssey).

Titles of Works

The English-language titles of compositions (books and other print works, songs and other audio works, films and other visual media works, paintings and other artworks, etc.) are given in title case, in which every word is given an initial capital except for certain less important words. The first and last words in a title are always capitalized.

Correct: Dark Age of Camelot

Correct: Star Wars: The Old Republic

Incorrect: World Of Warcraft

Incorrect: Lord of the rings online

Titles of People

• In generic use, apply lower case for words such as lord, duke, and count (Lasarian is a lord, Tundrra is a duke).
• In parts of a person's title, begin such words with a capital letter (Lord Lasarian, Duke Tundrra).
• When referring to the title specifically, begin such instances with a capital letter (The offices of the order are Lord, Duke, Count, etc).

Abbreviations

Write out both the full version for the first occurence.

• When an abbreviation is to be used in an article, give the expression in full at first. In the rest of the article the abbreviation can then be used by itself:

Dark Age of Camelot (first occurence)

DAoC (further occurences)

Ampersand

The ampersand (&) substitutes for the word and. In normal text, and should be used instead: January 1 and 2, not January 1 & 2. Retain ampersands in titles of works or organizations, such as Dungeons & Dragons Online. Ampersands may be used with consistency and discretion in tables, infoboxes, and similar contexts where space is limited.