STOWiki:Manual of Style

This guideline discusses best practices with regard to the writing style. We strive to achieve a consistent style across all articles. This however is only a guideline, not a policy. Violations against these suggestions should be corrected, but not frowned upon (see also Please do not bite the newcomers guideline).

Tense
All articles discussing in-game elements or aspects are written from a 2409 perspective. That means, that in general we use the present tense, as a contemporary encyclopedia does. Articles about Cryptic Studios or other meta-elements like the C-Store are written in a contemporary style, i.e. present tense for ongoing and current developments, past tense for completed and past developments and future tense for announcements etc. Articles that are specific to the STOWiki like the Main Page, these guidelines or talk pages should also use the present tense where appropriate.

Neutral style
Outside of guides, walkthroughs and talk pages, which are intended to give room for personal and subjective opinions, adhere to a neutral point of view. E.g. do not evaluate an item or ability when presenting it upfront. You may however add some information on its usefulness and relation to others of its kind in a Notes sub-section. This however should be backed not only by your personal opinion, but by external references like a profound forum discussion or a developer interview. Of course you can also present original research, but base your findings transparently on numbers, that everyone can reproduce.

Addressing the reader
Using second-person pronouns (you, your) is discouraged in articles with an in-game (e.g. items, skills, NPCs) or meta-game (e.g. a developer article, user interface, C-Store) subject. Try to find a neutral point of view and talk about the player in the third person. For example "the player's starship" instead of "your starship". Also try to differentiate between the player and the character. So in an article you might want to elaborate on "the character's health" instead of "the player's health".

In guidelines, project pages and talk pages using second-person pronouns is however strongly encouraged.

Article titles
In general, we prefer singular, lower case article names, if the game does not use the article title as a proper name. Article titles must not contain capitalized words unless they are proper nouns, such as "Federation", "Cardassian", "Sulu", ranks (when used as part of name), and "Spacedock" in the phrase "Earth Spacedock" (because it is itself a proper noun consisting of more than one word, each of which must be capitalized. Item names may be capitalized as they are in the game.

So for example an article would be named bridge officer, not bridge officers or Bridge Officers. Items are capitalized as in the game: Tribble of Borg instead of tribble of borg or Tribble Of Borg. Locations are generally capitalized: Sol System instead of Sol or Sol system; Fluidic Space instead of fluidic space; Alpha Quadrant instead of alpha quadrant or Alpha quadrant. Article titles must not contain ranks for characters in the game. For example, Jorel Quinn instead of Admiral Quinn.

The first occurrence of the article title (or a variant thereof, e.g. plural) in the article itself must be in bold. An exception are NPCs, who are always addressed with their rank in-game For example, in the article for Zihr starts with "Ensign Zihr is..." instead of "Ensign Zihr is...".

In order to distinguish identically named entities like the Accolade ' and the Trait ' the respective articles get separate prefixes.

Lists
An exception from the article naming guideline on plural forms are lists. The most prominent example is the list of missions.

Categories
Categories should adhere to the usual article naming guidelines, but in fact many are not. The Category: Federation Starships is such an example. Since it is a lot of work, to rename an established category with many members, users are encouraged to pay special attention to creating new categories.

Linking
For the following article types, the corresponding template must be used when linking to it:


 * LINKING: Should a new entry be created on the STO Wiki? Or should it be linked to the Memory Alpha wiki? If it is a link-worthy article, but is only mentioned in passing, then link to Memory Alpha like so. Otherwise, create a new article and/or add content to the article.
 * ONLY LINK ONCE: While we encourage linking as much relevant information as possible to new articles, only one link per page is necessary. So if the Romulans are referenced more than once, only the first reference may be linked.