Style Guide

Revision as of 20:09, 9 July 2021

Style guidelines for the EN (English) World of Warships wiki are found below. Contributions made by players should adhere to these general guidelines; entries that do not may be deleted (or possibly edited until they comply, depending on the quality of the entry).

But English is English

• Use North American English spellings. For example, "armour" is not correct.
• Use relatively simple English because not all readers are native English speakers.

Date Format

Do not use ambiguous date formats, for example:

• 3/5/2021
• 5/3/2021

Use unambiguous date formats, for example:

• 5 March 2021
• 5 Mar 2021
• March 5, 2021
• 2021-03-05

See Date format by country (Wikipedia).

Voice

• Second person ("you") should be avoided. Prefer "player" or "captain" and use third person notations wherever necessary. First person is never appropriate.

• Passive voice - "the ball was thrown by him" - is best avoided. "He threw the ball" is much more effective and less wimpy.

• Political correctness is no excuse for poor grammar. Constructs like "A captain [singular] should check their [plural, just to avoid gender] aft..." is incorrect. "A captain should check his aft..." is correct. 'His' is the singular indefinite personal pronoun. Use it.

Tier

An example of the correct way to reference a specific tier is "Tier VI". "tier 6" — with a lower-case 't' and Arabic numeral — is incorrect. Use lower case "tier" when referring to the generic tier, e.g. "service costs depend on ship tier;" "X-ship is the best at her tier."

Colliding numbers

When referencing quantities of something - such as gun barrels - do not use back-to-back Arabic numerals. Instead of typing "12 15-inch guns", please use the format "twelve (12) 15-inch guns", or "12x 15" guns" where space constrained.

Speaking of guns, remember to hyphenate "15-inch".

Ship and class names

• When referring to a specific ship, grammar rules dictate that an article is not used at all. Example: "Bismarck’s fifth salvo, however, produced catastrophic results." Think of it this way: when referring to a specific person, his name is used. People aren't referred to as "the Dave" or "the Bill" or "the Janet". The same rule applies for ships. When they are singled out specifically by name, the definite article is dropped and they are simply referred to as Fletcher or Scharnhorst or Danae.

• Similarly, ship classes used as a noun do NOT require hyphenation. Example: "The Neptune class was never " ...

• When referring to an entire class of ships, a definite article is used. Example: "The Iowa class battleships were among the fastest battleships ever built." The subject here is a group of ships, which is why the definite article is used (in most cases, depending on how the sentence is structured).

She?

While some nations (e.g. Russia, Japan) use the male gender in reference to their warships, there is considerable resistance among readers to us doing so here. Use female gender pronouns to avoid contention.

Very Very What?

Overuse of the word "very" devalues it. Don't use it. 95% of the time, you won't miss it.

Ancient History

Avoid referring to previous updates (or even the current update) in main body text. Yeah, okay, they moved Akizuki to Tier VIII in Update 0.5.whatever, but five years later, no one cares. Where necessary to e.g. warn of upcoming changes, use a {{block|!|content= ... }} insert.

Likewise, avoid referring to game changes at all in main body text. "With the new IFHE rework, pen is now 58mm" just confuses things. State what *is*: "Pen is 58mm".

It *may* be useful to track changes, for instance, changes to Anti-Aircraft fire, or cite a specific source. Do so in an endnote: <ref>See [[Ship:Update 0.9.4|Update 0.9.4]].</ref>

References

There are three primary types of references.

• An endnote <ref>Blah blah yammer.</ref> Endnotes are collected at <references />, usually at the end of a page.^[1]
• An inline internal reference (to another wiki page) [[formal page reference|inline text]]
• An external reference to a web location: [URL text]

More on all this later.

Endnotes are also useful for comments that would disrupt the flow of the main text.

Notes

1. ↑ Blah blah yammer.