Walking with Trilogy Wiki:Manual of Style

Walking with Trilogy Wiki's Manual of Style is the collection of editing and contribution policies designed to set a standard format and appearance for all of its articles. In addition to accuracy and completeness, one of the major goals for which Walking with Trilogy Wiki strives is consistency.

This Manual of Style is designed to ensure that articles are:


 * 1) easy to read and understand,
 * 2) organized and consistent,
 * 3) attractive to the reader, and
 * 4) easy to edit

Keep it simple
Above all else, you are encouraged to keep your articles simple! Don't try to get too fancy with your markup (like embedding tables within tables). The easier the markup is, the easier it will be for anyone to edit the article later on. Our first goal is to reliably and accurately display the information. The goal of wiki markup is to keep the articles simple and to emphasize the information as much as possible. We prefer content over form. For this and other reasons, HTML markup should be avoided in most circumstances.

Article names
There are some general rules regarding how articles on Walking with Trilogy Wiki should be named.


 * Article names should be in singular form, not plural. The only exceptions are things which always appear in plural form in the English language, such as binoculars.


 * The titles of articles about creatures should be the name by which the creature was most commonly known in the Walkingverse, with later names preferred to earlier ones, and full names preferred to partial names or nicknames. Titles such as "Shark," or "Raptor should be omitted.


 * Unless the name of the article contains a proper noun, only the first word should be capitalized.


 * Abbreviations such as "WWD", "SM", and "CBD" should not be used. Rather, they should be written out in full (Walking with Dinosaurs, Sea Monsters and Chased by Dinosaurs) with a redirect page created for the abbreviation (see "Redirects" below).


 * Articles for titles of spin-off material should consist of the item's full title. For example, "Walking with Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie" rather than just "The 3D Movie".  A redirect of the shorter title is usually a good idea.


 * Disambiguation tags may also be necessary in the title.

Article introduction
Every page should begin with an introduction, briefly summarizing the article for the reader. The introduction should give a quick explanation of what the article is about and establish its context. The length of the introduction can vary from a single sentence to multiple paragraphs. The title or subject of that article should appear in the first line in bold. Even though the article title is already listed, it's useful to emphasize the article's subject for the reader.

Headlines, sections, and spacing
To create a new section in an article, surround the headline text with two or more == (equal signs) and include one space between each equal sign and the nearest letter. The wiki engine will automatically create a table of contents once there are four or more headers in an article.

The first word and all proper nouns of the header should be capitalized, and all other words lowercase. For the purposes of keeping the wiki markup accessible to all users, include one blank line between a headline or sub-headline and the subsequent image or paragraph of text.

Please avoid using links in headers. Depending on the browser's default settings, some users may not be able to see the links properly. It is much more useful to place the appropriate link in the first sentence after the header.

To prevent an image at the end of one subsection from running into the header for the next section, type the following template directly above the next header:  . This template adds just the right amount of space to keep everything above the header for all browsers. If there is enough text to separate the sections already, the tag will not add space. See also advanced editing.

Redirects
Occasionally, certain characters or items are known by more than one name or more than one spelling. In most situations, it's wise to create redirect pages for any and all alternate titles that may be queried when looking for a specific article.

To create a redirect page, type the following in the edit field:
 *  #REDIRECT RealArticle