Help:Article Guideline

What makes a good article? This help should be a loose guideline for new articles. What Topics are used and what content should they provide? What kind of marker and templates should be used? This guide provides guidance on how to make quality contributions to the Gemini Station Wiki. If these guidelines seem too difficult to follow (non-native speakers, etc.) -- don't let them stop you from contributing! It is more important that the wiki has contributions than having everything "done right", and once content is in the wiki, other contributors can participate by putting it into a better style.

Page organization

1. Naming pages:
   1. Do not capitalize any words in the page name, except for words that are capitalized grammatically. Capitalize the first letter of the first word (wiki should do this automatically)
   2. Use full names for any page you create.
   3. Unless a significant part of the page or the section content is a list, the name of the page/section should be singular. This way the page can be linked while appearing either singular (page) or plural (pages), without needing to setup redirects.
2. Header names: The same rules that apply to naming pages apply to headers
3. Page size: Generally, pages should be big enough that they comprehensively cover a single subject.
4. Templates: Templates are created to help better organize content on the Wiki. See Templates for full explanation of how to use templates and what each one is for.
5. Categories: Always group pages into categories. If you are unsure which category fits best, ask a wiki staff member.

Wiki Formatting

1. Wikis work due to the use of internal links to other pages, the first instance of any other page should be linked with square brackets [[like this]]
2. Do not emphasize text with underline or CAPITALS, use italics instead, in addition avoid excessive use of bold
3. Write so that everyone can participate: do not personalize articles/pages by signing them or naming game concepts after yourself. The only place that this is allowed is your personal profile page.
4. The use of links in Section names should be avoided.
5. Do not use html code where wiki code exists to perform the same action, this includes plainlists, paragraphs and line breaks
6. Indent bullet points using multiple asterisks (**) instead of the colon followed by an asterisk (:*).

General layout

Each pages should have a straight and clear structure ordered by information density:

1. Wiki boxes/Head boxes

This is the place for special Wiki-Informations like marking the article as a stub or indicate that content is missing.

2. Special Information box

Now the reader sees a short and remarkable information provided by boxed infos. There are several templates that can be used. A list of infoboxes can be found here.

3. General information

The introduction is an essential part of an article. It's the basic description of the content and ties basic relations to other articles. The length of this part depends of the overall amount of information about the content. For larger articles it's recommended to split up the content to several topics.

4. Special topics depending on the contents article

These topics depend on the content and it's hard to predict how these parts could look like. Large articles should be split into logical parts, for example special behaviours or mechanics.

Each topic should begin with a short heading (== Heading 2 ==) followed by the content. Larger topics can be split up into smaller sub-topics beginning with === Heading 3 ===.

Never ever use 1. level headings (= Heading 1 =), they are reserved for the auto generated page title!

5. Group box

Some articles are part of a bigger group. These groups often have special boxes for the footer with lists of all contents and related links. The box templates also provide the group link.

Examples are the boxes for {{Attributes}}, {{Items}}, {{Editing Guides}} and {{Locals}}.

Things you shouldn't do

• Don't add speculations to an article
• Don't state your mind in an article
• Don't use too much formatting like bold,italics, etc.
• Don't spam the article with non-saying images
• Don't sign your edits in other places as talk pages.

Tips

• Please use the search before you start a new page, even if you come across a dead link. Sometimes links contain typos and create a dead link, although an article exists
• Check existing pages to get a feeling of the style of the wiki
• Before you change an article, think about what you do. Small changes can cause the article to look strange or not well developed
• If you have any doubts, use the talk page before you change anything