Style Guide

Hello! Welcome to the Discovery Mod Wiki Editing Style Guide.

• Note: Please refrain from editing this Guide. If you have style suggestions please discuss them on the Talk page or on the Discovery Forums

This Guide is intended as a reference for new and veteran wiki editors to acquaint themselves with the styles and formatting in use by the Discovery Mod Wiki. Following the directions and examples in this Guide will help the numerous people working on the Discovery Mod Wiki to maintain a consistent format and style across all of the wiki pages. Please be considerate of your co-editors and readers by attempting to keep consistency as much as possible. Consistency in style and format leads people to being able to find things quicker, to read faster, and to find the required information more efficiently.

If anything doesn't make sense or you don't understand something please give it some tries first and if you really don't get the idea, discuss it in the talk page. We are always aiming to improve this Guide. If you are really struggling to comprehend what is going on, or are looking for ground-level basic wiki editing help then please see the following: This wiki uses MediaWiki. For a more detailed overview about editing please consult the MediaWiki Handbook or Wikitext example page.

Google Search of this site.

The Basics

Below are some 'rules' that should be adhered to, for across-the-wiki style and formatting consistency. Information added to the wiki pages should be factual and not biased or subjective to any person's opinion. If you think a ship "sux" keep those comments to yourself. We are looking for information that is useful and true. If that "suxxy ship" turns a full 360 degrees in two hours, then please do write that up.

Remember that Wiki interprets a linebreak as an actual <br> or even a beginning of new paragraph. To avoid redundant whitespaces, you should not add linebreaks between the infobox template and the text content itself, otherwise the text looks nudged down. The descriptions goes directly below the templates.

Spelling

Spelling should be in the American international form. If you are unsure what the American international spelling is for a particular word, just leave the word as written for other editors to correct. Below are some examples of US / UK words.

• Tire / Tyre
• capitalized / capitalised
• color / colour

Proper Nouns

A proper noun is the name that an item, place or person is known or called by. Proper nouns should have their first letter of every word of that noun capitalized. For example: "John Smith" is correct. "New york" is not correct.

Please use all words of a proper noun where required. e.g. James Powell, Ames Research Facility, Cadiz Base. There are exceptions to this rule and the Guide will go into further detail at the relevant places.

Page Titles

Page titles should be in First Letter Capitalized format. This excludes conjunctions (of, and,). To keep track of these conjunction titled pages, please list them here if found or created, stating the page title and type of page.

• Jump Gate and Trade Lane Parts (commodity)

Page titles should be expanded. This means, please refrain from making pages titled "BPA", rather, expand the abbreviations so that "BPA" becomes "Bretonia Police Authority". This can be achieved by using piping links, or simply writing out the abbreviations.

In Text Links

In text links can use both lowercase words and uppercase. Use your discretion for which one is appropriate. Usually proper nouns will be first letter of every word capitalized.

Lowercase Links

Passengers are civilians who have money and courage for interstellar travels. As transports are favorite targets for pirate attacks, many passengers find it safer to travel to distant places in freelancing ships. You will find passengers willing to travel on almost all populated planets, price they will pay you generally depends on the length of the route.

Uppercase Links

This lush green world is the home of the Cambridge Research Institute - an institution devoted to pure scientific research. The idyllic green fields also find themselves home to the manor retreats of New London's aristocracy during the warmer months of the year. Bretonia's epidemic food shortages required the planetary regents to place scientists and farmers together to develop more bountiful crops, making Cambridge the primary food supplier for Bretonia. Now many Cambridge scientists sympathise with the Gaians echo-terrorist movement, prompting the formation of political groups such as The Green Front and igniting bitter debates among researchers on topics such as terraforming.

Piping Links

A piped link is when the highlighted words direct you to another discovery wiki page that does not use those words in the Title. The pipes should direct to the plural of items and subjects, unless it is a proper noun. See below for examples. The format is as follows [[Actual Piped Link|Words that are diplayed]].

*[[Bretonia Police Authority|BPA]]
*4 [[Class 4 Guns]]
*1 [[Class 7 Turrets|Class 7 Turret]] ****note the 's' missing when piping from a single weapon.

Results in:

• BPA
• 4 Class 4 Guns
• 1 Class 7 Turret ****note the 's' missing when piping from a single weapon.

Wiki lists

Wiki list sorting screws up when prices do not have the "$" in front of the price. Please add the dollar sign to all price lists and cost fields.

Images

Any pictures that you upload should be well lit and the viewer should able to easily and clearly see what the subject is. Dark pictures with the sun backlighting the ships, although artistic, are unacceptable for this wiki. Please use well lit, isometric viewpoints for ships; well lit, well framed pictures for planets and bases. The pictures and images should be uploaded in the .jpg format (or .png format if transparency is needed) and be of minimal filesize and reasonable pixel size (minimum of 800 x 600 is a good size to aim for).

If you are uploading an image of a named object (such as a planet, or a specific station), use the formal name of the object. If you are uploading an image of a generic 3D model (such as a ship model, or a turret model), use the name of the 3D model instead of the item. For example, if you are uploading a picture of the generic Bretonian Battleship, use the name of the ship model, but if you are uploading a picture of the specific Battleship Derby, use the formal station name instead. This provides separation between the item and the underlying model, thereby allowing multiple items to reference a single model, and allowing an item to change models without breaking the other linked references.

Example Image Specs: 

• Gas_miner (800 × 600 pixel, file size: 35 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)
• New London (535 × 528 pixel, file size: 61 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)
• Image:Argus_Battlecruiser.png (800 × 349 pixel, file size: 321 KB, MIME type: image/png)

Note: Please use the lowercase ".jpg" extension, and not the UPPERCASE one.
Note2: There are some differences between filetypes of images used:

• A jpg file does not have transparency. They are small in size and are suitable to be uploaded to this wiki directly. They are the thumbnails and medium pictures that you see when you go to a system/planet/etc... page.
• A png file can have transparency and the filesize is usually a somewhat larger. These can now be uploaded to the Wiki directly. A good suggestion is to get good renders of the ships and upload the png files. Major Thanks and Kudos to Igiss for activating this!

Categories

Every page should have an appropriate category. Every category section should go at the base of the page - the very last thing on the page. See the specific subject for more information. Clicking on this "Categories" link will take you to the categories so that you can see what categories are available if you need more than basic ones. Try to fit them into an existing Category first, but if that isn't possible feel free to make more as needed.

For a category beginning with "The" e.g. "The Junkers Congress" you can key sort the category as following:

[[Category:Player Factions|Junkers]]

This will put in the Player Factions categories, sorted under J, instead of T (default)
Most factions will be fine, automatically via the {{Player Faction}} template.
Manually adding this will override the automatic. 

Copy and paste. In general, one or more of these categories below will suffice:

[[Category:Liberty]]
[[Category:Kusari]]
[[Category:Bretonia]]
[[Category:Rheinland]]
[[Category:Outcasts]]
[[Category:Corsairs]]
[[Category:Civilian]]

[[Category:Natural Phenomenon]]
[[Category:Unnatural Phenomenon]]

[[Category:Commodities]]
[[Category:Weapons]]
[[Category:Bases]]
[[Category:Planets]]
[[Category:Ships]]
[[Category:Stations]]
[[Category:Systems]]

[[Category:Factions]]
[[Category:Player Factions]]

You can see a full list of categories here.

Guidelines for units of measurement

Unit of measurement	Definition(s)	Unit symbol(s)
Angles	Degrees	deg, °
Angular velocity	Degrees per second	deg/s, °/s
Distance	meters	m
Distance (geographical)	K, meters	K, m
Velocity	meters per second	m/s
Energy (ship power cores)	Energy	u
Energy usage (equipment)	Energy per second	u/s

Centurion's Wiki Editing Style

An overriding principle is that style and formatting choices should be consistent within a Wiki article, though not necessarily throughout the Wiki as a whole. Consistency within an article promotes clarity and cohesion. Writing should be clear and concise. Plain English works best: avoid jargon, and vague or unnecessarily complex wording.

Titles

This is a summary of the policy governing the titles of the articles within this Wiki/Encyclopedia. It applies to the titles of Wiki articles, not of external articles that are cited. The guidance here also applies to Section headings, immediately below. Where these guidelines conflict, the balance between them should be decided by consensus of other members, like User:Cshake, User:Alex, User:Blodo or even me.

• Article titles should conform to the rules of this Wiki, and they need to be in understandable English.

• Titles are NOT to be written in only capital letters.

• Titles should match the article contents, and should be neither too narrow nor too broad.

• Do not use a, an, or the as the first word (Economy of the Second Empire, not The economy of the Second Empire), unless by convention it is an inseparable part of a name, like The Order.

• Avoid special characters such as the slash (/), plus sign (+), braces ({ }), and square brackets ([ ]); use and instead of an ampersand (&), unless the ampersand is an accepted part of a name (Jack Cornelius Aubrey & Alexander Heneage Aubrey).

Titles should be short.

• The final visible character of a title should not be a punctuation mark, unless the punctuation is part of a name (Saint-Jardon-du-Ha! Ha!).

Text

It is imperative that all the articles within this Wiki are in understandable US english. Every article within this Wiki needs to have a text-body inside, not only an image. Same goes for the 'market-list' articles aswell. This is a Wiki people, not a summary on what happens in the game. Everything should be written from the perspective of a narrator.

Small notes:

• Reduce consistency, since the text will no longer look uniform.

Rules and guidelines

What is a Wiki? • The Discovery Wiki • Editing rules • Style guide

Getting started

The Basics • Editing and creating pages • Wiki markup guide • Code generator guide • Uploading images

Common templates

Ships • Factions • Bases • Planets • Systems • Reviews • Version • Commodities

Other useful pages and tools

General wiki discussion • To-do list • Outdated pages • Wanted pages • Incomplete pages • Active editors • FLStat • Freelancer Companion