MSPA Wiki:Manual of Style

This is the Manual of Style for MS Paint Adventures Wiki. This page will give an idea of how to write articles so they are consistent with many of the similar articles. Note that this page is still a work in progress, but what it says thus far should be followed.

Editors should also read the Discussion "Manual of Style", which advises on how best to format posts on talk pages and forum pages for streamlined and consistent communication.

General article guide

 * Jailbreak 's title is one word, not two.
 * Flash, or more fully, Adobe Flash, is a commercial product. Therefore, "Flash" is capitalized.
 * Article titles should use the most complete confirmed canon name available, e.g. "Calliope" or "John Egbert" rather than "uranianUmbra" or "John". It must also be written in singular instead of plural, e.g. "Troll" – exceptions are only when the article is a list, e.g. "List of dead characters", or naturally lends itself to plurality, e.g. "Ongoing gags".
 * Article titles should not capitalise all words, e.g. "Ongoing gags" or "Draconian Dignitary (post-Scratch)", not "Ongoing Gags" or "Draconian Dignitary (Post-Scratch)".
 * Always include basic information about the subject when starting an article.
 * When writing the article content, adventure titles should be written in italics, e.g. Homestuck. Song titles will mostly not be mentioned in articles outside of the relevant album articles, and in infoboxes, where there is a specific template for them. However, if a song title is mentioned in the main text of an article, it should be in quote marks, e.g. "Umbral Ultimatum".
 * The definite (the) and indefinite articles (a/an) should be avoided in article titles, except if they are used as the official title.
 * Wikilinking a word or phrase is limited to the first occurrence of that word or phrase on the page.
 * Many terms are commonly capitalized by the fandom, most notably "Dream Self" and "First Guardian". These terms actually should not be capitalized (i.e. "dream self" and "first guardian"), as barring rare exceptions, they are not capitalized in MSPA, or in Hussie's tumblr expositions. Other terms have been capitalized in-comic but not on Hussie's tumblr, such as the Scratch, the Green Sun, the Tumor, the Furthest Ring, or the Red Miles. We aren't sure how to deal with these; probably best go by what MSPA has used most.
 * Don't all-caps any words unless there is a good reason. All-caps is used in MSPA for emphasis, usually when a term is first used. It should only be used on the wiki if it's clearly a stylistic part of the phrase itself. Which will basically never be the case, so don't do it.

What should an article have?
What is needed can vary wildly depending on the topic of the page. Some things which would be found of almost all pages of a single topic may be completely absent from pages of a different topic.

For characters
Character articles, arguably the highlights of this Wiki, should be divided into:
 * Biography
 * Personality and Traits
 * Relationships

At the bottom of the page, with no section headers, place:
 * 1) The navigation templates related to the character.
 * 2) The relevant categories associated with the character.

For concepts
...

For Locations
Each major location gets an article. Locations are usually given the fullest title used. A location article should include:

Place the navigation template related to the location, and don't forget to categorize them according to the relevant categories.

When writing an article
Articles on the MS Paint Adventures Wiki, like the text in MS Paint Adventures itself, freely go between the careful, precise, general descriptive tone of Wikipedia and the generally conversational tone of MS Paint Adventures, riding mixed ongoing gags like a mechanical bull to establish superiority. In terms of the layout and ordering of content, bear in mind that sloppy is fine, but more importantly, arranged is fine too.

Active voice
The active voice is much stronger than the passive voice. Here is an example of a sentence in the passive voice: Now, here is an example of that same sentence, except written in the active voice In the active voice, the person performing the action is the subject of the sentence, instead of the person or thing the action is performed on.
 * John is stabbed by Jack for the second time, and...
 * Jack stabs John for the second time, and...

Verb tense
To determine which tense to use in articles, it is logical to describe events happening in-story in the present tense. Out of story, however, it may be more relevant to use the past tense. In other words:
 * Use present tense to describe plot and events as they happen, e.g. "Jack stabs John", not "Jack stabbed John".
 * Use past tense when describing things that are objectively in the past from a real world perspective, e.g. "[S] Cascade was released on October 25th".

Spelling
Since Andrew Hussie is American and uses US English in his adventures (Calliope notwithstanding), it is logical for this wiki to also use US English. However, that does not mean Commonwealth spellings must be purged. By all means, change them if you're editing the article in question anyway, but preferably don't make edits purely for that purpose.

Point of view
On most Wikis, there is a policy to give a "Neutral Point of View" (NPOV). Events should be described objectively, as a rule, and in particular should not represent any particular fan bias.

Your personal ships in particular do not belong in articles, and will be disposed of in the customary way.

Spoilers
It is preferable to keep spoilers in the obvious sections, e.g. under a character's story heading rather than in their intro. However, our spoiler policy is essentially that we don't have one, and unmarked spoilers are to be expected. As such, one should aim to keep article openings as unspoilery as possible, but not go out of one's way to avoid everything that could possibly be a spoiler.

Categorizing
Each article must be categorized, and done so according to which category applies to it. A list of categories can be found here.

Category redundancy should be avoided. For example, a page that is categorized under Category:Homestuck Characters should not also be in Category:Homestuck and Category:Characters.

When creating tables and infoboxes

 * For table formatting and markup, see Help:Tables

When making a template
Be sure to add an explanation of what purpose it serves, so that the other users of the wiki do not have to guess. This goes double for admins, since if they see no purpose or even possible future potential use for the template, it is likely to be deleted. The explanation can be written as part of the template (between a and ) or in the discussion page.

Adding images
The general practice would be to start image placement on the right side by adding "right" in the image coding, as in " ". The next image would then be placed on the left – " " – forming a sort of zigzag pattern.

An image without white or transparent background should be thumbnailed by adding "thumb" in the image coding, as in " ".. A caption should be added to thumbnailed images, a short description of what the image is by writing the caption at the end of the code, as in " ".

Image galleries should be created when a number of images in a section clutters the layout. Image galleries should also be used with a caption to describe each of the images it contains.