Minecraft Wiki talk:Style guide

Text style
Note: Ha3 already started a style guideline at User:Ha3/Style. It might be helpful. - Asterick6 (talk) 02:29, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Also, there was a discussion already at Minecraft Wiki talk:Community portal/Archive 9. Please continue the discussion here as well. - Asterick6 (talk) 22:22, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Update: User:Metalhannes/Grammar goes over some basics of grammar (that everyone is probably already familiar with). But I still see frequent instances where an opening clause does not have a comma. Example: Originally water was infinite. Here, there should be a comma after "originally". I know that some styles don't use such commas, but this strongly applies for longer clauses, so we should just use commas every time. - Asterick6 (talk) 22:25, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Capitalization
I think we can all agree that the wiki should be consistent, but there's been debate over what should be capitalized, particularly blocks and items. Personally, I'm leaning toward capitalizing anything that's named in-game. To me, "a house made of Wood" means it's built of Wood (log) blocks, while "a house made of wood" implies any block made of wood (planks, slabs, etc.) could be used. That may just be my particular use of language, though. Any other arguments one way or another? -- Orthotope 09:13, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I'd have to disagree on this one. Apart from looking very odd, capitalizing every single in-game item is unnecessary and common sense dictates the opposite because they are not proper nouns. Mojang developers themselves have never capitalized item names because that makes no sense whatsoever. Official Minecraft Forum posts and any offical posting relating to Minecraft have never capitalized item names. Notch's blog posts or any of the Mojang tweets NEVER capitalize item names. Only proper nouns (e.g names of places like The Void or The Nether) should be capitalized in my opinion. Also a better solution to the wood dilemma is to specify exactly what type of wood you need to avoid ambiguity or by linking to the relevant article. The capitalization solution is a bit confusing unless you take a second look. Hower64 10:02, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Me too. If something is a sufficiently important in-game term, or the subject of the article, better practice is either to link to it or italicise it the first time it appears, thereafter treat it normally. I've written style guides before. I'll dig them up and see what areas of them may be relevant.--82.69.54.207 11:04, 6 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Point taken; capitalizing every instance of an in-game term does look rather strange. (At least in English; it probably doesn't stand out so much in German.) -- Orthotope 08:48, 8 June 2012 (UTC)


 * All items/blocks should just be lowercase then, unless the name involves a fictional word or proper noun/adjective/word such as Nether brick or End stone. - Asterick6 (talk) 03:10, 10 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Also, only the first instance of the article title/topic can be capitalized. Example: for the Chicken Egg article, the first sentence would be: A Chicken Egg is.... not: A chicken egg is...
 * All other titles/phrases after the first should be completely lowercase unless it is fictional ("Ender Pearl" would still be "Ender pearl" and not "ender pearl"). - Asterick6 (talk) 23:44, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

I think capitalizing properly is important. Ex. "A Chicken Egg can be used to bake a Cake." Looks stupid. So it should be, "A chicken egg can be used to bake a cake." If you don't get it, because this is a wiki, (not spelling class) you need a book on spelling and capitalization. Creepergoboom64 17:28, 26 August 2012 (UTC)Creepergoboom64

Mobs
I think fictional mobs should be capitalized and real mobs should be lowercase, so Mooshroom is capitalized and cow is not. Or all mobs can be capitalized. - Asterick6 (talk) 03:10, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I like the idea of having fictional mobs capitalized and real animals lowercase, on the other hand, having all mobs capitalized sounds worse then having no mobs capitalized. Hower64 09:04, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Ok, but we need to determine which mobs are fictional and which are not. This depends on how fictional we consider the mobs. I'm thinking that the pig, cow, sheep, chicken, squid, wolf, ocelot, zombie, skeleton, spider, cave spider, giant, and villager are "nonfictional" mobs (i.e, they exist in real life or real life fiction). The Creeper, Enderman, Mooshroom, Snow Golem, Iron Golem, Pigman, Zombie Pigman, Ghast, Blaze, Magma Cube, and Ender Dragon are definitely fictional mobs (although some retain real-life names).

Now here are the tricky, specific considerations:

I'm not so sure about the Giant, Slime, Silverfish, and Spider Jockey. The Slime and Silverfish are real-life things in name only, since their behavior and appearance are greatly different. The Spider Jockey is actually just a combination of a spider and a skeleton, but the combined mob is also completely fictional thing. In fact, we could also argue that these Minecraft mobs are completely fictional since they are fictional game things, but that makes things too complicated and seeing stuff like "Cow" everywhere makes this wiki look like it's turning into the German wiki. I think we can capitalize the Slime, Silverfish, and Spider Jockey, since they are "fictional" mobs even though they have real-life names (same applies to the Creeper). The Giant retains the definition of a giant, except that it's a giant zombie. Should the name "Giant" be capitalized? Also, the skeleton is a real-life thing, but its behavior is greatly different from regular skeletons in real-life fiction. Should it be capitalized or not?

For the mobs with 2 words for names, such as Iron Golem and Zombie Pigman, should we capitalize the entire mob name, or only the "fictional part" (i.e., Ender dragon and zombie Pigman). I'm beginning to overthink this... in fact "Magma Cube" is composed of two real-life words, so it could be "magma cube". "Snow Golem"/"Iron Golem" could be "snow golem"/"iron golem" as well, since the names exist in real-life because there are real golems in real-life fiction, though not necessarily made of snow and iron, although they could be just a type of golem. But the actual Minecraft mob is completely fictional in appearance and behavior (even though the Iron Golem is derived from the robots in Castle in the Sky - but this is a big stretch and should not be considered). Do you guys have any thoughts? And I'm completely screwing up proper usage of commas and proper grammar. - Asterick6 (talk) 01:13, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Article titles and section headings
Article titles should be in lowercase unless the phrases are proper nouns. They should also be in the singular form to maintain consistency. For section headings, we should follow sentence style capitalization, not title style, so only the first letter of the heading is capitalized. - Asterick6 (talk) 22:22, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Update: Names such as TNT retain their capitalization in titles.

Do you guys think that proper nouns/fictional mob names should be in lowercase along with all other words in the section heading? Or should we retain the capitalization? Asterick6 (talk) 01:47, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Image captions
Image captions should not have periods at the end, unless the phrase is a full sentence. - Asterick6 (talk) 01:08, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Italicizing
Any instance of "Minecraft" should be italicized. Any emphasis (in talk pages, etc.) should be italicized instead of being bolded or capitalized. - Asterick6 (talk) 05:15, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Spacing
This style guideline isn't completely necessary, but it helps to keep every article in the same format.

All articles should have single spaces between fullstops (periods) and the next sentence. No double spacing, unless you guys think we should make the change to double spacing between sentences for better readability/formatting.

All articles should have a space above and below a section heading to allow adequate space between blocks of text to improve readabiltiy and facilitate editing. Regularly formatted file links, video template code, disambiguation code/hatnotes/text, reflist and - (or similar templates) can be placed directly above or below a section heading without spaces. There should be a space between the wiki code/html code and regular text. Gallery code, wikitables, and the history template should be spaced just like regular text (with a space between the template code and the section headings. Video templates should have 2 spaces below the template code to allow adequate spacing below the embedded video. Any templates such as blocks or items should be spaced 2 lines away from the last line of article text such as reflist if there is a references section. The reflist can be placed directly below the section heading. - Asterick6 (talk) 00:29, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Example (view in edit mode):

Section title
Text here.

Section title


Text here.

Section title
Text here.

Section title

 * Text here.

Text and symbols
For file links such as and in galleries, all underscores (in wikicode) should be spaces. URLs need to retain underscores (obvious reason). Special characters should not be replaced with HTML code (please comment there are good reasons to use HTML code for special characters, since I'm not sure if there are). Add on if I missed any other instances. - Asterick6 (talk) 01:29, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Date formatting
While not common in the US, I think YYYY-MM-DD (as used in Minecraft screenshots) is the most useful. The main advantage is that sorting dates as text (such as on the Programs and editors pages) also sorts them chronologically. -- Orthotope 09:13, 6 June 2012 (UTC)


 * We discussed date formats a while back. No clear decision was really made though.
 * Here's some example date formats I've seen on the wiki:
 * 1st January 1994
 * 1st January, 1994
 * 1st of January 1994
 * 1st of January, 1994
 * 1 January 1994
 * 1 January, 1994
 * January 1st 1994
 * January 1st, 1994
 * January 1 1994
 * January 1, 1994


 * Personally, I think we should use the international standard (YYYY/MM/DD. Forward slashes or dashes, it really doesn't matter) for tabular data and cramped areas like the infobox, and use one of the first six date formats above for normal article text. –ultradude25 (T&#124;C) at 10:35, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

When writing a numbers-only date format, we should use YYYY-MM-DD, because it is the ISO standard. The ordering lets it sort nicely, and the dashes help distinguish it from the US date ordering which is nearly always written with slashes. I offer no opinion on long date formats. —kpreid 18:11, 6 June 2012 (UTC)


 * How about "month name" DD, YYYY (June 10, 2012) since this wiki is supposedly using AE? Or we could just use the wiki date format, DD "month name" YYYY. This can prevent confusion with using numbers for months. - Asterick6 (talk) 01:40, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Page organization
Many pages have Trivia, History, Bugs, Gallery, and/or See also sections, usually toward the end, but there doesn't seem to be any consistent ordering to them. It would be nice to have some guideline as to which order to put them in, though I don't have an opinion on what it should be. -- Orthotope 09:13, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * This has definitely been bugging me a lot lately. I would say the most logical order and the one most wikis have would be: History -> Bugs -> Trivia -> Gallery then See also. Any opinions? Hower64 10:02, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I like that ordering. We should also specify where “Video” (bleh) goes; I would propose buried at the bottom, er, above History but below all current textual information. —kpreid 18:11, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * This ordering is fine, but the video section should go after the history section and before gallery/trivia. - Asterick6 (talk) 03:04, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't see a need to change every page just to put the video section after the history section :S. Hower64 09:04, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Course not, just remember to move them or fix the small things whenever you edit pages for vandalism, cleanup, or updates, etc. It's efficient to do edits along with other edits instead of editing a page only to move sections around. Every editor should remember to fix small things along with the intended edit whenever (they) update a page. - Asterick6 (talk) 22:53, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

I think each block/item article should be ordered like this: lede, Uses/Properties, Crafting, (additional sections), Video, History, Bugs, Trivia, Gallery, See also. For articles of mobs, it can be ordered like this: lede, (spawning, appearance,) behavior/AI, combat/breeding,, defense/strategies, video, history... For articles such as crafting with long crafting recipes/lists, I think the history section should be first since the crafting recipes section is very long. Since the history section is unrelated to the other sections, it can be placed first, then the related sections, and then the long crafting list. - Asterick6 (talk) 03:04, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Issues about history-cruft were brought up before at Minecraft Wiki talk:Community portal where editors should move history versions and the associated content (as of xxx, etc.) to the history section, (but I think the problem might be fixed now). - Asterick6 (talk) 02:29, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
 * So many pages with that issue... Hower64 09:04, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

History sections
Should this be sorted with newer items at the top or bottom? Another one where I care more about consistency than which one we use. -- Orthotope 09:13, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * We should implement a system similar to what the official TF Wiki uses in which all patch notes are organised in a consistent format with relevant links and a neat scroll bar to take up less space. Hower64 10:02, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * We could implement that to template:history. - Asterick6 (talk) 02:06, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

They should have the newest items at the bottom; as each item will generally describe differences from the previous situation, this ordering creates a readable “story” and communicate the historical context of each change better. Also, I think most history sections are already in that order. —kpreid 15:20, 6 June 2012 (UTC)


 * I thought all of them are in that order already. - Asterick6 (talk) 02:06, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

What about the development versions? I think the update changes should retain the exact version of the update/change (e.g., 12w08a instead of 1.2), or we could just not document these changes (and save time) and only use the official release changelog. I kinda like having all the changes listed as they occur. - Asterick6 (talk) 02:06, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah I think we should keep the exact snapshot of change instead of merging it with the official release just because it saves time and is more accurate. Hower64 09:04, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

See also sections
Is there a point to these? Most of the time, all the listed pages are already linked to in the article. -- Orthotope 09:13, 6 June 2012 (UTC)


 * I think they should include things which are either not already linked, or are material which one might expect to find in the article (except that the wiki more finely divides things). For an example of the latter, I might put a link to Spawn from Mobs, because someone looking to thoroughly understand mobs is quite likely to want to know about their spawning as well. “See also” sections should not include merely related items; for example, I would remove the SA link to Gunpowder from Creeper, because it is already linked and the uses of gunpowder are not part of understanding creepers. —kpreid 18:11, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

Style guide from another wiki
http://kevan.org/morningtonia.pl?Style_Guide - that's rather more specialised wiki than here, but I think we should consider stealing and modifying the following numbered guidelines: 1 2 4 5 9 11 12 16 20 and incorporating them into our own guidelines. Maybe one or two others as well, but I think on the whole those are the main ones. --Simons Mith 22:39, 17 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Most of them are relevant to this wiki, but 3 and 14 should also be addressed. I don't think 12 is a good idea; that might just confuse editors. Plus, most browsers should support the characters.
 * So here are some of the guidelines (modified to fit this wiki):
 * Second and subsequent mentions of the term being defined should not be bolded/italicized.
 * Avoid excessive use of capitalization. Proper names, fictional names and terms such as Notch and Mooshroom should be capitalized, but most game modifiers – e.g., stone brick or wooden planks should be in lower case.
 * Also when linking, try to make the link self-describing, so that users can tell where it will send them before they click on it. For example, rather than "For a tutorial on mob farming, click here", use something like "For a tutorial on mob farming go to Tutorials/Mob Farm".
 * - Asterick6 (talk) 00:41, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
 * That doesn't apply to video games. More things than just proper names and fictional names are capitalized. Almost every video game wiki follows this style. --Moxxy 21:14, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Style guide article length
The content of the style guide WIP looks OK to me, but I'm worried it's going to get far too long. I would suggest choosing a size limit of 3-4 screens max. Catch is, at that size there might not be enough space for examples showing good practice. So perhaps it might be worth having a short version which just lists the rules - like the 'other wiki' style guide I linked above - and a longer version which has more explanation and gives examples of correct usage. Then maybe link to the examples from the short version. Or else, use those expanding widgets text boxes to hide the explanation and examples? --Simons Mith 01:47, 30 June 2012 (UTC)