Girl Genius:Manual of Style

Where User:Graybeard tests out his mad inventions, i.e., templates, articles that might or might not belong, etc. If you have an idea for a page that might be created, mention it on the discussion page. Next project up in this space: a Manual of Style.

=Manual of Style=

In which is codified all the stuff that goes into making a "good article," written in a way both pleasing and helpful to the community. This is a work in progress that is subject to the same tweaks and twiddles as anything else on this wiki. It is also intended to provide guidance rather than restrictions. The most important principle of writing articles for a wiki is: If you see a topic that needs to be covered by an article and you can write about it, write about it and let others clean up the style and formatting if necessary. So also here.

Basic principles
There are three basic principles to follow as you write:
 * 1) First and foremost, have fun, help others to have fun, and don't interfere with the fun of others (e.g. by spamming or gratuitous personal attacks).
 * 2) Try to write in a way that simultaneously informs and entertains.
 * 3) Be mindful of copyright issues and other things that could create problems for the wiki.

The first two are fairly obvious in concept, if not necessarily in practice. The third may not be. This is a "public domain" wiki and anything written here becomes public-domain when it appears. Material written by the Foglios and Airship Entertainment is not public-domain; it is copyrighted and owned by them. Copying material from the Girl Genius pages lock, stock and barrel is therefore inappropriate, although inclusion of brief quotations and segments of images "for review purposes" generally is consistent with copyright law. Absolutely do not take the entire contents of the Girl Genius Complete List of Absolutely Everybody pertaining to a character and stick it in an article here! That's awfully hard to justify as a brief quotation for review purposes, and it's disrespectful to some authors that we respect and want to work with. Be scrupulously careful with copyright issues; they're the one bit of serious trouble you can get into here.

Articles on people (including Jägermonsters, etc.)
People are the essence of the story of Girl Genius, and it's important to get articles on people right. Note that "people" are not necessarily the same thing as "humans;" Krosp I, Emperor of All Cats, qualifies as a "people" despite definitely not being human, and so do Jägermonsters and many other Constructs. A general rule is: if it displays intelligence, free will (if you believe in such things...), and a personality, it's a people.

Naming conventions
An important resource for authors creating "people" articles is the Girl Genius Complete List of Absolutely Everybody!, or GGCLAE for short. This is a part of the main Studio Foglio site wherein the Professors Foglio have tried to compile brief sketches on all the characters they can think of, and it's enormously valuable to us here. The overriding general principle for all character names is: If in doubt, call the character what the Foglios call him/her/it. This will avoid confusion as readers flip back and forth between story and wiki. 90% of all character names can and should be lifted directly from the GGCLAE and made the article titles.

Remarkably enough, the GGCLAE is not a "complete" list; there are a few -- very few -- named characters that have (or will/should have) articles here but aren't mentioned in the GGCLAE. In these cases, the name of the article is something of a judgment call, but the principle is again to call 'em what the Foglios call 'em, i.e., use the names as they appear in Girl Genius itself. In the incredibly rare cases where even this general principle doesn't produce clear guidance, err on the side of the most "complete" name for the character that appears in the comic. Redirects can always be created to allow use of more terse names within the bodies of articles. There are also a very few spelling errors (horrors!) in the GGCLAE. When in doubt, the spellings in Girl Genius itself take precedence, but don't worry too much about this issue -- moves and redirects can fix most problems resulting from GGCLAE misspellings.

Infobox
The first thing in a "people" article should be the "infobox" that will appear at the upper right-hand corner of the finished page, giving the basics about the subject of the article. To incorporate the standard infobox into your article, copy the following text into it at the very beginning of the article: This segment should go before any text in the article itself, even the name of the character. That'll help with organization of the article as you go on.

Once this is in place, fill in any of the entries for which you know the answer. If you don't know a particular bit of information, leave the item blank; do not remove it. The wikimarkup is smart enough that it won't display entries where nothing appears on the right-hand side of the equals sign, and by leaving the blank field in place, you make it easier to add the data if future events provide them.

Content
Articles on people should start by explaining briefly who the character is and why he/she/it is important to the story. Follow this with a section on the character's personal history or backstory, to the extent that it's known. Links in this section to Girl Genius episodes that illustrate key moments in the history are a very good idea; see below under "References" for how to include them. Next, include information on notable characteristics of the character, including his/her/its relationships with other characters, etc., and other such fun stuff as appears appropriate. If any of these sections run longer than a paragraph or so, delimit sections after the introductory one with section titles, e.g. ==Personal History==. (Note: please start with second-level titles, i.e., with two equals-signs on either side of the title, not one; section titles looking like =This one= should not be used.)

Strive to keep the content of these articles descriptive and neutral, but they need not be sterile; this isn't Wikipedia we're developing here. A little speculation now and then is OK as a narrative hook, but most speculation should be reserved for Forum articles rather than spots in the main part of the wiki. Avoid first-person-singular inclusions with opinions ("I think that Bangladesh DuPree is HAWT!"), but some first-person-plural colloquialisms every now and then are OK ("We've seen Bang at work doing her blood-and-gore thing at Sturmhalten"), as are similar, second-person bits of color ("you wouldn't believe how much damage Bang can do to an army when she puts her mind to it"). Just don't overdo them.

Articles on places
Most of the guidelines for articles on "People" also apply to articles on "Places." However, there is no infobox for places, so just jump right in and go through the general description, history/backstory, interesting properties of a place, and so on.

If the place is customarily referred to by its actual name, capitalize words in the article's title just as you would for any other proper name (e.g. Castle Heterodyne, Balan's Gap). It may eventually happen that places without known proper names become important enough in the story to justify articles (e.g. "Bar at the end of Wulfenbach Street"). The same principle applies: capitalize words in the proper name, but not others, except for the first one.

Images
Images should be used sparingly; our goal here isn't to duplicate Girl Genius itself, after all, plus we want to stay away from things that invite copyright issues. However, there are a few situations where images are to the point. The primary place for an image is the infobox at the start of "People" articles (see above), which has a field for a single image showing the person who's the subject of the article. Other, less systematic opportunities to show images may come up from time to time, but no more than two images per article, please.

Images used in the People infobox should be cropped so that they show the subject and nobody else, to the extent possible. It's OK to have small fragments of other people/places/things in the image if there's no easy way to crop them out, but make sure the emphasis is on the subject. Speech bubbles can appear as needed, but should be minimized unless they illustrate something important about the character. Infobox images should be no more than 200 pixels wide, as the Infobox template will crunch them down to this size; choose your cropping accordingly.

Grammar, spelling and all that stuff
American English is the standard for the wiki (Girl Genius, after all, originates in the United States), so that "defense" is preferred to "defence", "color" to "colour", "emphasize" to "emphasise", and so on. However, conformity to a particular dialect shouldn't be a fall-on-your-sword issue. If you're more comfortable with British or Australian or (insert favorite country here) English than with American English, go ahead and write your article as you see fit; subsequent edits may rephrase the thing in American English, or there may be a shrug of the community's collective shoulders and the article will stand as written. Either way, edit wars over dialects are discouraged. Please be tolerant of others.

This said, there's always room for both accuracy and a bit of color (colour?) in your article. The article on the Klaus Defence League is properly titled, because the virtual organization that the article described is named in conformity to Commonwealth English rather than American English. And if hyu vants to write someting about a Jägermonster using dat Jägerisch dialect dat dey use, dat's OK too.

First, second and third person
The fundamental mode for most articles is third person -- "Character X first appears here, does this, does that," and so on. However, this isn't an encyclopedia we're constructing here; it's a wiki, and it's supposed to be fun. It's OK to include the odd witticism that breaks the fourth wall -- "Ognian thinks he's leading-man material, and if you believe that, you probably believe that Mel Brooks is leading-man material too." Just don't overdo it, and try to keep first-person singular out of your writing, except in talk pages (where your opinion matters, so express it as such, and sign it with four squiggles, ~). Speaking of which: do not sign contributions to the articles themselves, except for Forum articles.

Internal references ("wikilinks")
Use of wikilinks to other articles in the wiki is a Good Thing, and if you're in doubt as to whether to include a link, go ahead and include it; there's practically no downside. There's no reason why the links can't be fun. If you're writing an article that references Yeti as a big, hairy, bare-chested guy, it's OK to use the wikimarkup big, hairy, bare-chested guy rather than the bland Yeti if it makes the article more interesting to read. However, make sure to give the article a particularly careful proofreading before saving things like this, as they're rather prone to typos that can have ... interesting ... results.

Categories
When linking in Categories (which is strongly encouraged), please follow these conventions:
 * For characters with common, two-part names (e.g. Lucrezia Mongfish), the categories should cite them so that they appear in alphabetical order, last name first -- that is, Lucrezia Mongfish should follow Lucifer Mongfish in the category and precede Ludwig Mongfish (if there's ever a character by that name). To achieve this, use the wikimarkup  .  For example: .
 * Character pages with titles (nobility, medical, etc.) should be sorted by last name rather than by the title. Duke Strinbeck, for example, should have a sort like:.
 * For articles on human characters with "unusual" names, preserve the spirit of the alphabetization. For example, the article on the  Baron's rescuer The Unstoppable Higgs should have categories like: .
 * Place names, names of Clanks, etc., are all handled just by calling them what they are; for example, for categories in the article on Smilin' Stev, the usual  will do; there's no reason to gild the lily with something like . Humans should be entitled to some additional respect here, after all!
 * Leading articles should be suppressed by the sort; for example, the Heterodyne play The Fog Merchant should be treated as "Fog Merchant, The" for categorization, so its link to the category should look like.

Tip: If you do create an article that will use some name other than the article name for properly alphabetizing the category entries, the DEFAULTSORT switch can save you a lot of typing. For example, in the Lucrezia Mongfish example above, if you include </NOWIKI> in your article right before the categories, you won't have to mess around with each individual category; the last name will be used for all categories as the alphabetical starting point. Use of this switch is encouraged unless there's some reason not to use it.

External references
Use of external references is also encouraged, within reason. It's often a good idea to illustrate some salient point in your article by referring to the Girl Genius episode that makes the point for you. For example, if you're writing about Bangladesh DuPree's broken jaw, a pointer to the episode where it's shown wired shut (to the Baron's immense relief), http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20070718</NOWIKI>, is a nice thing to include.

Either of two means of including these references are acceptable. You can: Both ways have their advantages, but please strive for consistency in the way you do references.
 * simply set up a synonym in your text, e.g. like this</NOWIKI>, in which case the text that incorporates the synonym will look like this; or
 * use the "Reference" capability in Wikimarkup and phrase it like this: </NOWIKI>, in which the outcome will look like this. (You should see a reference at the bottom of the page.)  Note that if you're using this syntax, you need to be sure to include the tag  </NOWIKI> at the end of the article so that the references will be listed there.

Links to Studio Foglio pages are almost always good to include where appropriate, but if you're including references to the world beyond, e.g. Wikipedia or Wiktionary, try to keep them to a minimum. Readers know that there's life beyond Girl Genius, and you don't really have to point it out to them.

Categories
Most elements of style relevant to the usual "subject" articles also apply to Category articles. However, because it's awkward to do redirects among Categories, it's a good idea to take time before creating a new Category and verify that it's necessary. If in any doubt, check the Special:Categories list and see if there's a Category that covers the area that you intend.

A limited amount of information on the topic of the Category can and should be incorporated into the Category article itself. However, if the topic is important and distinctive, a stand-alone article should be written with most of the information on it, and linked into the Category as a member of that Category. If you write such an article, insert a null "name" for the article in its Category listing for sorting purposes, so that the article will be the first to appear in the list of articles falling within the Category. For example, Master Payne's Circus of Adventure is both an article (because the Circus is interesting in its own right) and a Category (because it's interesting to see what all characters, clanks, etc., have been in the Circus). Accordingly, the end of the article should (and does) contain this Category listing: </NOWIKI>. To see how this works out, look at the Category article, Category:Master Payne's Circus of Adventure, and you'll see that the article is the first entry on the list of articles. Writing separate articles this way is preferable to populating the Category article with too much stuff, as the neophyte user of the wiki may have a hard time finding the information in the Category article unless cumbersome redirects are used.

Conflict resolution
(to be added)