Minecraft Wiki:Style guide

This article aims to provide a comprehensive style guide for all Minecraft Wiki articles to follow. There are often disputes over which style rule or formatting to use and hopefully the inclusion of an official style guide will help resolve these disputes as well as in helping to reach a consensus.

Although Wikipedia already provides a more general style guide, a more specific one is necessary for Minecraft specific guidelines. As such, only guidelines pertaining to the Minecraft Wiki and its basic formatting rules should be included here.

Writing
As this wiki's purpose is to document facts, you should always avoid speculative and unsourced information. Generally speaking, information does not require sources if they can directly be seen in-game or are otherwise obvious. Other information however, such as quotes from Mojang employees and information that is not widely known, must be sourced with a proper reference. The template should be placed after any information that requires a source. Do not add content to an article if you cannot find a proper source.

Articles in the main namespace should always be written in the third-person perspective and without terms referential to the reader. Try not to use abbreviations of words either. For instance, sentences like "You shouldn't come close to creepers because they'll explode and kill you." should be written as "The player should not come close to creepers as they will explode, potentially killing the player.".

To emphasis points, italics should be used, not bold or ALL CAPS.

Keeping articles concise and up to date
In short, articles should only contain information that is up to date, i.e., implemented in the latest full version of the game. Anything that is outdated should be moved to the History section of the article. When something changes, note the change in the History section and remove the outdated information from other sections of the article. It is unnecessary to mention when a particular feature was implemented; this is once again reserved for the History section of the article. Sentences such as "Trading, which was implemented in 1.3.1, is a feature that allows players to exchange emeralds (previously rubies) for other items." should be written as "Trading is a feature that allows players to exchange emeralds for other items."".

Here's an example of how to not write a good article. It uses a previous version of the Wood article. This is the full introduction. Highlighted in yellow is the redundant information, and in pink the history information.

Wood (previously known as log) is a type of block first seen in Minecraft Creative mode 0.0.14a They have a skin resembling bark on the four side faces, and a crosscut face on top and bottom. Only the normal oak logs are available in chunks generated before the Beta 1.2 update and all previous versions, whilst pine and birch will generate in newer chunks. Wood is greatly abundant in naturally-generated maps, as it is used as the foundation for trees. Wood can be chopped by hand, but using an axe is faster. Wood is also flammable.

Of the current wood types, birch is the rarest type. They are often used to make plants, trees and wooden cabins. In Survival Test, wood blocks drop 3 - 5 wooden planks when mined. In Indev, Infdev, Alpha, and Beta, mining a wood block will drop a wood block instead. This allows the use of wood as a building material and is craftable into planks.

Wood's only crafting use is to be made into four wooden planks. In addition, wood can be burnt in a furnace to make charcoal as a substitute for Coal.

As of the Minecraft Beta 1.2 update on January 13, 2011, there are now four kinds of wood. One is the normal wood (Oak), another resembles the wood of silver birch trees, yet another type resembles the normal wood, but it is darker and appears in pine/conifer trees that grow in colder biomes, the fourth type is similar to the oak wood, however there are some color differences and it is tilted to one side. These wood blocks still produce 4 Wooden Planks when crafted. Wood from different types of trees will not stack in the inventory, but their planks will. Planks made from different kinds of trees are completely identical. Birch trees have slightly duller colored leaves than regular trees, pine trees have pine needles, and jungle leaves are leafy with fruit looking shapes on them.

The fourth type of wood was introduced in Snapshot 12w03a, solely occurring in Jungle Biomes, and comprising trees exclusive to them. The tallest trees have this type of wood in 2x2 dimensions instead of the normal 1x1.

The issue with this is that old information is scatted with new information. The introduction should state the current description of the block with the current release. History information is good, but for clarity, it should be described in the chronological order in a single place: the History section of the article.

Future
Content added in future updates may be added to the article in the main content, provided the features are marked using upcoming and have appeared in development versions. If the update contains major changes to the article, then the content may be noted as a subsection of a main section, or as its own section called Upcoming. Upcoming features must be noted as well in the history section using the proper upcoming header.

Upon the release of the update, all content that is now outdated must either be moved to the history section or removed, and any usage of upcoming may be removed.

Grammar
Pages on the wiki should use American English unless the in-game name is British English. For instance, “colour” should be “color”, and “centre” should be “center”.

Capitalization
In-game items should be treated as common nouns and as such should not be capitalized. This includes fictional items, such as prismarine. Proper nouns however, such the Nether or the Overworld should always be capitalized.


 * Structures

In-game structures should be lower case. Biome names should also be lower case. Examples:
 * Underground, there are randomly generated abandoned mine shafts.
 * A desert temple contains precious loot.
 * Blazes spawn in nether fortresses.
 * In deep ocean biomes, ocean monuments can generate.
 * A stronghold is home to an end portal.


 * Mobs

Any instance of a mob should be treated as a common noun, unless the mob is referred to as a proper noun. If the word "the" is used before the mob name, it should not be capitalized unless it is at the beginning of the sentence.

Examples:
 * One of the most feared mobs is the ghast.
 * A spider can poison its prey.
 * The player has been referred to as Steve.


 * Enchantments

Enchantment names should always be capitalized.

Example:
 * In order to have ice drop an item, you need a tool enchanted with Silk Touch.


 * Status effects

Status effects should be capitalized, unless used as an adjective.

Examples:
 * Magma cream is required for a potion of Fire Resistance.
 * Wither skeletons may inflict Wither on the player.
 * An invisible spider may rarely spawn.


 * Editions

Do not capitalize "snapshot" or "pre-release". Also, "pre-release" should be in this form, not as "prerelease" or "Pre-Release". Development phases should be capitalized.

Editions should only be capitalized when used as nouns.

Examples:
 * Minecraft officially came out of Beta on November 18th, 2011''
 * The cyan flower was introduced in Pocket Edition Alpha 0.1.
 * ''Of all the editions of Minecraft only the Pocket and Pi Editions have cyan flowers.


 * Game modes

The name of game mode types should also be capitalized.

Examples:
 * In Hardcore mode the game acts similar to Survival mode except the difficulty is permanently set to Hard.

Article titles and section headings
Article titles should be in sentence case, not title case, unless the phrases are proper nouns. They should also be in the singular form to maintain consistency. For section headings, follow sentence style capitalization, not title style, so only the first letter of the heading is capitalized.

Article main sections should start with level 2 headers (two equal signs) and increase by one for subsections. Never use level 1 headers (one equal sign). There should be one space between sections as well as one space between the equal signs and the section name for ease of editing. If any "main article" links or thumb images are used, place them immediately under the section header, and then a space after those before the section content.

For information on which sections should be in which order, see the Article layout section of this style guide.

Italics
Any instance of "Minecraft" should be in italics. Any emphasis (in talk pages, etc.) should be in italics instead of being in bold or uppercase letters. Any instance of the name of a videogame should also be in italics. For instance: Team Fortress 3.

Image captions
Image captions should not have periods at the end, unless the phrase is a full sentence.

Linking

 * For a complete guide to linking, please refer to Wikipedia's Manual of Style for links.

The use of links is a difficult balance between providing the reader enough useful links to allow them to "wander through" articles and excessive linking which can distract them from their reading flow.

Underlinking can cause the reader to become frustrated because questions may arise about the article's contents which can only be resolved by using the search option or other sources for clarification, interrupting and distracting the reader.

Overlinking may distract the reader because links are usually colored differently causing the eye to shift focus constantly. Additionally, if the same word is linked multiple times in the same paragraph it can cause the reader to question if the links are directing them to different articles or not.

The guidelines for linking are:


 * No more than 10 percent of the words in an article are contained in links.


 * Unless it affects the sentence's wording and readability in a negative way, two links should not be next to each other in the text so that it looks like one link.


 * Links for any single term should not be excessively repeated in the same article. Excessive linking is defined as multiple use of the same term, in a line or a paragraph, which will almost certainly appear needlessly on the viewer's screen. Remember, the purpose of links is to direct the reader to a new spot at the point(s) where the reader is most likely to take a temporary detour due to needing more information.


 * Duplicating an important link distant from a previous occurrence in an article may well be appropriate. If an important term appears many times in a long article, but is only linked once at the very beginning of the article, it may actually be underlinked. Indeed, readers who jump directly to a subsection of interest must still be able to find a link. But take care in fixing such problems, the distance between duplicate links is an editor's preference, however if in doubt duplicate the term further down the article.

Linking to a redirect is preferred over using a piped link except in templates and other pages that will be transcluded. When a piped link is unavoidable, it should not point to a redirect. If a redirect can be avoided using a suffix on the link, that is preferred. E.g. Using  instead of   is desired.

Date formatting
The Minecraft Wiki is an international community. That is a good thing in general, but it makes a problem for numeric abbreviations of dates, such as "12/10/11": while most countries abbreviate dates as day/month/year, some Asian countries use year/month/day, and the US uses month/day/year. So the above date could represent any of three different dates. To avoid this problem, most dates should be written in "Month, DD, YYYY" format, e.g. "December 10, 2011". Do not use superscripts or suffixes such as "April 23rd" or "4th of May". If a numeric or terse date is needed (such as in a table), then use YYYY-MM-DD, always with 2 digits for month and day (e.g., 2011-12-10 or 2012-05-04). Besides being the ISO standard, dates in this format will naturally sort properly, say if the table column is later made sortable.

Redstone structures
Write-ups for redstone circuits and mechanisms should follow a single convention on the wiki.

Article layout
For the sake of consistency, all articles of a specific type should follow a general layout.
 * At the very top, applicable flags and templates, such as snapshot for anything not yet in the full release, Block for blocks, and so on.
 * Templates at the top should go in the order of info boxes, then dablinks, and then message boxes.
 * Introduction with a general description.
 * Article body, starting with first header.

If an article does not contain a layout currently, one can be proposed on the talk page, otherwise, attempt to use a layout that follows a similar style to an existing layout. Current article layouts include:
 * /Features/

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