Minecraft Wiki:Style guide

Please edit this page to include any guidelines that have reached a consensus.

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.

Capitalization
In-game items should be treated as common nouns and as such should not be capitalized. The only exception to this are items that include a proper noun in the item's name, for instance: Ender Chest or Nether wart.

Proper nouns however, such the Nether or the Overworld should always be capitalized.

Species of mobs that are fictional and only exist within the Minecraft world such as Creeper should be capitalized. Any other instance of a mob should be treated normally. If the word "the" is used before the mob name, it should not be capitalised unless it is at the beginning of the sentence.


 * i.e. One of the most feared mobs is the Ghast.
 * A spider can poison its prey.

Article titles and section headings
Article titles should be lowercased 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.

Italicizing
Any instance of "Minecraft" should be italicized. Any emphasis (in talk pages, etc.) should be italicized instead of being bolded or capitalized. Any instance of the name of a videogame should also be italized. For instance: Team Fortress 2.

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

History
History sections should use template:history. To provide accuracy, the update changes should retain the exact version of the update/change even when the full update comes out (e.g., 12w08a instead of 1.2).

Overlinking and underlinking
For a complete guide to linking, please refer to Wikipedia's Manual of Style (linking).

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.

Article layout
All articles (with the exception of few) should follow this layout: