Scum Wiki:Manual Of Style

The Manual of Style (often abbreviated MoS or MOS) is a style guide for all Scum Wiki articles and official documents. It establishes our house style, to help editors produce articles with consistent, clear, and precise language, layout, and formatting. The goal is to make the encyclopedia easier and more intuitive to use. Consistency in style and formatting promotes clarity and cohesion; this is especially important within an article.

Article Titles, Sections, and Headings

Article Titles

An article title is a convenient label for the article, which distinguishes it from other articles.

The following points are critical to formatting article titles:

• Use "Title Case": The initial letter of each word in a title is capitalized
  • Example: Beef Stew, not Beef stew.
• Item pages should be named the same as their in game name, with spelling corrected and capitalization changed to "Title Case".

Article sections

• Headings can link to other articles ONLY if the entire heading is made a link. Partial links in headings are not allowed.
• Citations should not be placed within or on the same line as section and subsection headings.
• Headings should not contain images, including flag icons.

Category Titles

• Category titles must be in the plural form: Category:Weapons not Category:Weapon

Spelling

American spelling should be used on all encyclopedia articles on Scum Wiki, on any template transcribed on articles, on transcripts, and on all official projects and blog posts. There are the following exceptions:

• Regional variations in spelling may be used in all other contexts on Scum Wiki, such as comments, talk pages, user pages, blog posts, fanon and fan fiction.
• If quoting a source, never alter any part of the quotation, even if it does not use American spelling.

Punctuation

Apostrophes

Consistent use of the straight (or typewriter) apostrophe ( '' ) is recommended, as opposed to the curly (or typographic) apostrophe ( ’' ).

Commas

Modern practice is against excessive use of commas; there are usually ways to simplify a sentence so that fewer are needed.

Colons

A colon ( : )informs the reader that what comes after it demonstrates, explains, or modifies what has come before, or is a list of items that has just been introduced. The items in such a list may be separated by commas; or, if they are more complex and perhaps themselves contain commas, the items should be separated by semicolons.

• In most cases a colon works best with a complete grammatical sentence before it. There are exceptions, such as when the colon introduces items set off in new lines like the very next colon here.
• The word following a colon is capitalized, if that word effectively begins a new grammatical sentence, and especially if the colon serves to introduce more than one sentence
• No sentence should contain more than one colon. There should never be a hyphen or a dash immediately following a colon. Only a single space follows a colon.

Semicolons

A semicolon ( ; ) is sometimes an alternative to a period, enabling related material to be kept in the same sentence; it marks a more decisive division in a sentence than a comma. If the semicolon separates clauses, normally each clause must be independent (meaning that it could stand on its own as a sentence); often, only a comma or only a semicolon will be correct in a given sentence.

• A semicolon does not force a capital letter in the word that follows it.

• A sentence may contain several semicolons, especially when the clauses are parallel; multiple unrelated semicolons are often signs that the sentence should be divided into shorter sentences, or otherwise refashioned.

Terminal punctuation

• Clusters of question marks, exclamation marks, or a combination of them (such as the interrobang), are highly informal and inappropriate in articles.
• Use the exclamation mark with restraint. It is an expression of surprise or emotion that is generally unsuitable for an encyclopedia.

Spacing

• Never place a space before commas, semicolons, colons, or terminal punctuation.
• Always place a space after the punctuation marks just mentioned, unless it is the end of a paragraph, dot point, list element or the article.
• Use one space after terminal punctuation. The use of double spaces is pointless as MediaWiki automatically condenses any number of spaces to just one when rendering the page.

Dates and time

• Avoid expressing time relative to what is considered "current", as new information can easily outdate it e.g. This item was removed in update 1-22-21, not This item was removed last January.
• Use of the term "current" should be avoided. What is current today may not be tomorrow; situations change over time. Instead, use date and time-specific text.

Numbers

• In general, write whole numbers one through nine as words when used within a sentence, write other numbers that take two words or fewer to say as either numerals or words, and write all other numbers as numerals: 1/5 or one fifth, 84 or eighty-four, 200 or two hundred, but 3.75, 544, 21 million). This applies to both ordinal and cardinal numbers.
• Use a comma to delimit numbers with four or more digits to the left of the decimal point: 12,345 and 1,000.

Grammar

• For the possessive of singular nouns ending with just one s, add just an apostrophe.
• For a normal plural noun, ending with a pronounced s, form the possessive by adding just an apostrophe e.g. "his sons' wives".

Formality and neutrality

• Uncontracted forms such as do not or it is are the default in encyclopedic style, however, don't and it's are also allowed.
• On encyclopedia articles, avoid such phrases as remember that and note that, which address readers directly in a less-than-encyclopedic tone. Similarly, phrases such as of course, naturally, obviously, clearly, and actually make presumptions about readers' knowledge, and call into question the reason for including the information in the first place. Do not tell readers that something is ironic, surprising, unexpected, amusing, coincidental, unfortunate, etc. This supplies a point of view. Simply state the sourced facts and allow readers to draw their own conclusions.

Images

• Item images should be named the same as their in-game name, adjusted for proper spelling and capitalization.
• Update images should be inserted with a size no larger than 600 pixels in width

Links

To add a link in a text, surround the word with brackets (i.e. [[word]]).

• Make links only where they are relevant and helpful in the context: Hyperlinks are distracting and may slow the reader down.
• Favor Fandom wiki links. External links to other Fandom wikis are allowed and encouraged over all other external links as long as they are relevant to the article. Other additional external links can be listed under an external links section at the end, pointing to further information outside SCUM Wiki as opposed to citing sources.
• Avoid using Wikipedia links. Fandom wikis and other different external sites should be favored over Wikipedia links.

Use direct links rather than linking via a redirect page.

When linking to a normally not capitalized word in the body of a text, it suffices to create a lower-cased link When linking to an article for plural use, it suffices to create the plural form of the linked word by creating a pipe-link (e.g. [[Bottles|Bottle]], not[[Bottle]]s).

Miscellaneous

Source mode editing markup

• Place spaces on either side of the text in a heading e.g. == Heading ==.
• Place a blank line before a line containing a heading, except when a sub-heading immediately follows a heading, where there should be no blank line between the heading and the sub-heading.
• Do not place a blank line between a heading and the text or files below it.
• File link parameters should appear in this order: [[File:Filename.png|thumb|right|200px|Description.]]
• Place blank lines before and after a file, separating it from body text.
• Place a space after the asterisk and hash symbols in unordered and ordered lists respectively, so that each new list item is easier to find e.g. * Item.

To promote consistency and ease of editing, the following items, if appropriate, should appear in this order before the lead section of an article.

1. Information about other uses, similar topics and links to disambiguation pages.
2. Notices detailing article quality and areas of improvement.
3. Infobox template, if a relevant one exists, split apart with a line for each template parameter. The closing curly bracket for the infobox template should be on a new line. The lead section should begin on a new line after this curly bracket.

Separate each of the items listed above with a blank line.