NWNWiki talk:Manual of style

A Manual of Style is a common wiki page that details how things should be layed out. I created it so we can clarify some style issues.

Capitalization
This has been driving me crazy -- mainly because I'm not sure of the answers, but hopefully others can help figure it out. When should article titles be capitalized?

This is an important issue not only from a style perspective, but because links are case sensitive. Armor Class links but armor class does not.

It seems clear that spell names are always capitalized, but that doesn't seem to be the case for skills and other abilities. Is it Pick Pocket or pick pocket? What about Hit Points and hit points? (Looks like I setup a redirect on that one, which is an option, but I'm not sure we want a capitization redirect on every single article.) (Actually, that's another issue, it should probably be the singular Hit Point or hit point).

Am I the only one who lays awake at night thinking about these things? :) -- Austicke 09:25, 12 Sep 2005 (PDT)

I can see where you coming from, and most of this problem most likely come from my editting. I thought I did alright keeping check on those. I like the looks of Caps. Pick Pocket or Hit Points, if someone doesnt want caps all they really have to do pick pocket or hit points. Is there a simple way to looking into and fixing them all, and I just have to search. -- Pstarky 11:18, 12 Sep 2005 (PDT)

This comment from Llandru was moved from Talk:Main Page:

A number of articles on NWNWiki currently have capitalization that doesn't work well with the wiki software's searching facility. Specifically, searching is case insensitive if only the first letter in the article title is capitalized and the rest are lower-case (e.g. prestige class works, as the actual article is called Prestige class).

Otherwise, the search requires exact case, which is not always desirable (IMO). E.g. half-elf and even Half-elf fail because the actual article is called "Half-Elf" (the hyphen is treated as part of the word); nwscript fails because the actual article title is "NWScript"; red dragon disciple fails because the actual article is called Red Dragon Disciple.

I think the exact-case titles can be defended sometimes (e.g. "Shadows of Undrentide"), because the official name requires case-sensitive titling, or for other valid reasons, but in those cases, a redirect should be created from the case-insensitive title form (like in the "shadows of undrentide" example).

Otherwise, articles should probably follow standard Wikipedia style for article titles (initial letter capitalized only). We should also avoid overloading article titles (e.g. if "My favourite Article" and "My favourite article" lead to different article, then I think there's a problem).

Reference: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization).

Note: I'm not the title police, I'm just bringing up some points for discussion, and to encourage people to think about these issues and consider what redirects are needed when starting an article. --Llandru 10:56, 1 Oct 2005 (PDT)

Good point, Llandru. As you can see, I raised this very issue not too long ago. I created the NWNWiki:Manual of Style so we can standardize these things. I think we should use lower case except for official titles. Shadows of Undrentide should be capitalized, but I'm still confused by things like Hit Point. It's an official term, but I often see it written as hit point in BioWare material. I wonder if WotC (look at those caps :)) has standards on this.... -- Austicke 11:44, 4 Oct 2005 (PDT)

Proper english wants us to capitalize each word in the title. OTOH, software doesn't always use proper english (to say nothing of some of the contributors to this wiki (ha ha J/K folks!). In an encyclopedia, the titles are capitalized.  In the dictionary, the entries are not capitalized.  This thing is sorta both isn't it?  For searching, it seems clear that an uncapitalized search should always work, regardless of circumstances.  Klingon Mage 05:03, 6 Oct 2005 (PDT)

Im having the same problem here, I dont know what to do too.(I hate to say it, but most of this has come from my editing. : Caps in heading just look correct, but if it makes searching a real pain then I think we should really do something about it. One question: when you make a new article and you dont cap any of the words, does it not automaticly Cap the first character in the name? Eg. If you do search for hit point and the article was created with no caps. The search will find the article, and when you see the name of the article or heading of the article on the page, it will look like Hit point? -- Pstarky 05:34, 6 Oct 2005 (PDT)


 * Thanks for moving my comments, Austicke. Yes, if you search for "hit points" then it will show the article as "Hit points", and it would fail to find "Hit Points" (though in this case there's a redirect). It's a tough problem, and one that plagues Wikipedia as well (ex. "timon of athens" (notice it turns up "Timon of athens") vs. "Timon of Athens"). Proper English rules are actually a bit more complicated than simply giving each word initial caps (ex. Hordes of the Underdark is proper English). Also, different "flavours" of English encourage more or fewer capitals, and different style guides offer different rules.
 * This suggests two things to me (keep in mind these are merely my opinions). First, because of the limitations of the software, our highest priority should be to make article titles that are findable and linkable without needing proper case (ex. we should prefer titles "That are like this"); when a title must have case-sensitive capitalization, there should be a case-insensitive redirect. Second, because there is more than one "proper" way to capitalize, we should show tolerance for each other's stylistic preferences when a case-sensitive title is needed; the alternative is a lot of policing by the admins to enforce an arbitrary style, which I don't think anyone wants.
 * The only thing that remains is to decide what needs case-sensitive capitalization (with redirect), and what should simply use the case-insensitive form. I'm with Austicke in preferring case-insensitive form for everything except proper nouns and official titles. We should try to keep the wiki structure simple and easy to understand; to me that means the fewer redirects, the better. For things that are uncertain, like "Hit point", I think we should leave the article in case-insensitive form by default. Probably for those we'll have to decide on a case-by-case basis, which can be worked out on the article's talk page. What do you think?
 * --Llandru 18:33, 9 Oct 2005 (PDT)

I agree that following the Wiki standard (uncapitalized article titles) is a good idea. I thought I would also add a thought on why things like "Hit Points" are sometimes capitalized. The capitalization makes these terms stand out as having a special meaning in D&D. (A similar tactic is used in legal documents. Does "The Software is licensed to you, not sold, by Infogrames, and its use is subject to this License." look familiar? Note the capitalized "Software". The word is explicitly defined in the beginning of the EULA.) Thus, when a character enters Rage, you know that character is not simply angry. In the Wiki, a similar effect can be achieved by making use of links. (e.g. A character enters rage.) It might be best to set the standard for naming the articles, and let the individual authors decide what looks best within the articles.

So why is "Hit Points" only sometimes capitalized? When D&D first came out, "Hit Point" might have been a new phrase, so it got capitalized as a game term. (I'm not sure if it was new; that predates my gaming by a bit.) Now its game meaning has been largely accepted as its everyday meaning, so people will write it in lower case and never think twice about it being a D&D term. Does that make sense? I'm trying to say that "hit point" only has one meaning, while "rage" is both an emotion and a Barbarian's ability. I'm not sure if that tells us if we want to always capitalize it, but maybe that might help explain the inconsistency. --The Krit 20:25, 23 Nov 2005 (PST)

The Great Renaming

 * We've been pretty militant enforcing the capitalization rules with NWN2Wiki, and I think it works much better. It's nice being able to link to articles without having to unnaturally capitalize words so the link will work. It'd be a huge task, but I think we should go back and rename all articles to use lowercase unless they're proper nouns. Yep, all feats, spells, etc. Who's with me? (Waits for cricket sounds....) -- Austicke 10:02, 22 Dec 2005 (PST)
 * If u do, make sure u update the "extenal links" we're putting up in NWN2Wiki--Defunc7 11:15, 22 Dec 2005 (PST)
 * Good point, Defunc7. Actually, I think we'll want to keep all the redirects that are created ("Arcane Archer" redirecting to "Arcane archer"), because I've posted a ton of links to the BioWare forums and other external web sites. -- Austicke 11:26, 22 Dec 2005 (PST)
 * Keep in mind y'all that the software forces all article names to be capitalised. Even it you write it hit points, it's still going to send you to Hit points. As far as the software is concerned, both of those are identical. Just something to be aware of. Evilphoenix 18:04, 22 Dec 2005 (PST)
 * Understood. That's fine, because hit point connects with Hit point. The problem is that hit point and Hit point don't connect with Hit Point. That's the problem. Therefore, only proper nouns should be all caps. -- Austicke 18:21, 22 Dec 2005 (PST)

Typographical punctuation

 * Is the bit about not using typographical punctuation supposed to apply just to copying those characters? The Wiki software does provide a standard way to enter the various dashes: - from -, – from &amp;ndash; and &mdash; from &amp;mdash;. The way I understand it, "-" is for hyphenation (e.g. 20-sided), "–" is for ranges (e.g. pages 1–20), and "&mdash;" is for the occasional separating of clauses within a sentence. I don't see why you would want to prevent someone from using the standard punctuation, provided it was entered properly.--The Krit 01:24, 3 January 2006 (PST)