Help: Manual of Style

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Revision as of 04:30, 26 October 2011 by Mordin999 (talk | contribs)
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This Manual of Style is a collection of rules of thumb and guidelines for giving our wiki a consistent look and feel. It is intended as a handy reference for editors. Feel free to suggest or discuss guidelines, over at the forum or on the discussion tab.

General rules

  • Use the Preview button.
  • Follow the format of existing pages as much as possible, you canalways use the sandbox to test code.
  • Add a descriptive summary when editing a page, A "minor edit" is a fix to a typo or small change that does not affect the page. No summary required.

Discussion

  • Sign your name at the end of your post by adding 4 tildes (~~~~)
  • Indent your post with a colon (:) when replying to a previous post.

Referencing

  • For all articles, notes and references/sources are combined under the same subsection: References. For this, simply type {{references}} at the bottom.
  • Cite only sources that are considered Canon and reliable sources like [www.westeros.org/Citadel/Concordance/ Concordance]. Do not cite secondary sources unless there are valid conclusions drawn based on the previous.

Article layout

An article should begin with an introductory lead section, that provide an overview of the topic, followed by the rest of the article divided into sections, each with a section heading. 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.

Tense

  • Articles that cover events taking place before the novels should be written in past tense. However, events taking place in the book series should utilize present tense - even if the event is outdated by new books in the series.

External links

  • Do not use external links in the body of an article. Articles can include an external links section at the end as further reading, the following sites should be linked: Official sites (that majorly relate to the topic), articles about the subject of article on other encyclopedias or vast resources that contain neutral and accurate information that has not been mentioned in the article.

Sources and Copying

Information for the content of pages comes from a lot of different sources. If the source of your contributions is something other than the books, please state your sources.
Copying from wikipedia is okay; the content of wikipedia is free but there are some rules, which are stated in our attribution help page. In short you have to refer to the original article. This is a must!

  • A good way to do this is using the template {{EnWP|<article from wikipedia>}}

Images

  • Uploaded images must be related to A Song of Ice and Fire and it's derivative works, the one exception being if you want to upload an image for your userpage, of yourself or for a userbox.
  • Always tag the images you're uploading with copyright information, for this you can use copyright tags template.
  • It's prefer that any primary image used (be it a photo or an artistic depiction) is one that does not deviate too much from how the character is described, and a good artistic depiction over a photo when one is available. [1]

Categories & Templates

  • User:Linda, forum post.