Xeno Series Wiki:Manual of Style

This is the manual of style for the wiki. It defines guidelines for how text should be written.

Article titles

 * Titles should be singular rather than plural.
 * Titles should be nouns rather than verbs.
 * If a multi-word title is not a proper noun, then the words should not all be capitalized.
 * If a page requires disambiguation, first try to resolve it by specifying the game in question (e.g. "Back Slash (XC1)"). If this is not sufficient, how to proceed further will depend on the subject.

Headers

 * Because article titles are level-one headers, articles should only contain level-two headers and below.
 * Subsections should be one level offset than their parent, not more.
 * Like article titles, headers should not capitalize all the words if they are not proper nouns.
 * Headers should be kept short.

Text

 * Paragraphs should be used to break up long stretches of text.
 * The article's subject should be in bold text in the first sentence. Using bold text to emphasize names in lists is acceptable (if they are not links). Bold text should be otherwise generally avoided.
 * Italics should be used to mark the names of games. Using italics for emphasis can be acceptable.
 * Other forms of text decoration (e.g. underlines or colours) should not be used.
 * An exception may be made if the text is replicating its appearance from the original source. This should still only apply to tables and templates, not prose.

Writing style

 * While formality is generally best, an amount of flippancy is acceptable.
 * Profanity should be avoided when possible. It is almost always possible; the only exception is in direct quotations.
 * For summaries of in-game events, present tense should be used whenever possible.
 * Abbreviations should be spelt out in full the first time they are used in an article, and perhaps again at the start of a long section.
 * Avoid second-person writing (e.g. "you can do this") in favour of third-person (e.g. "the player can do this" or "[character] can do this").
 * In regards to American vs. British English spelling differences, the preference is to match that of the article's subject (e.g. articles relating to Xenoblade Chronicles should use British English because this is what the game uses). If the article has no such obvious affiliation, either is acceptable, as long as the whole article is self-consistent. One should not edit a page solely to change one spelling to another.
 * Similarly, in-game units are likely to remain in metric even if Nintendo of America displays them otherwise. Always note the metric number as the primary, and only show the non-metric one as a sidenote.
 * Dates should be formatted as "DD month YYYY". Use the Date template, which automatically converts it to the correct formatting, whenever possible.

Internal links

 * Articles only need to be linked to once, or maybe again at the start of a later section.
 * Use efficient links where possible.  isn't necessary when   works, and   isn't necessary if   is a functional redirect - especially because "Specific section" might later be split into its own page, and doing it this way means less work repointing existing links. Redirects in general are harmless.
 * It may be preferable to make exceptions to the "use redirects" guideline for navbox templates, as redirects do not apply the "current page is bold" formatting to links.

Translations
When translating text from other languages:
 * Always include the original text in some way. The two main ways are "original followed by translation" and "translation with original in the notes/references", but depending on the context other methods are fine.
 * If there is an official translation, it has priority. But there are cases where an additional non-official translation may provide additional information.
 * Do not simply paste in a machine translation (e.g. Google Translate), especially for Japanese.
 * Avoid translating only part of something. Save your work somewhere if you don't have the time to finish it, but "all-or-nothing" is the preferred method for pages. Among other reasons, partial translations make it hard for things like templates to detect whether a page should be marked as "needs translation" or not.
 * Try to avoid copying a translation from elsewhere. We'd rather not depend on the accuracy of other sources. In a perfect world, all of the wiki's translations would be made "in-house".

Images

 * Images should generally be unedited. We would like to be as accurate to the original source as is reasonable.
 * Converting images from weird formats to standard formats (such as .jpg or .png) is okay, as long as care is taken that there is no noticable change.
 * Cropping is fine if most of the image is irrelevant to a context.
 * Cutting out a background (to make it transparent) should be done with caution, but is probably fine for artwork with defined edges.
 * It's okay to take screenshots from emulators, but they shouldn't use any features that would make it "invalid" to get from a real console (e.g. higher resolution). Exceptions can be made if the subject cannot be shown legit, such as using a camera hack to show a model normally hidden offscreen, if the point of the image is to show this.
 * Wii U screenshots should always be taken from the TV. Only take screenshots of the GamePad if the content literally cannot be shown on the TV.
 * Nintendo Switch screenshots should be taken in docked mode. Handheld screenshots are acceptable, but should be tagged for improvement and replaced if possible.