Project:Structure
Entries
One entry deals with only a single concept. Where other issues are tangentially related, these may be summarized in a few words (such as mentioning Garzahd's role and death in the Empire-Avernum War in the biography of Empress Prazac), but whenever a certain topic moves away from the original article's subject, it should be moved to its own entry.
Catch-all and Overviews
Some topics like magic, teleportation and demons are broad enough to deserve several different entries, but still belong to a single subject. Also, they might have been so incompletely developed that, if split into different articles, the result would be a dozen one-line stubs.
In this case, a catch-all entry should be made, and specific sub-entries - like Haakai for demons, should be made into a redirect to the catch-all. Note that once the sub-entries grow to a sufficient size, they should be split off into their own entries. In this case, a brief summary (one paragraph) remains in the catch-all entry, and a link to the complete entry is placed there.
Naming Convention
Capitalization
MediaWiki requires the first word of an article title to be capitalized.
When titles consist of more than one word, only the first word is capitalized, except for the following cases:
- A word is a proper noun: Abolishment of the Triad, not Abolishment of the triad
- The group of words together makes up a proper noun: Crystal Souls, not Crystal souls
This does not include cases such as the Olgai tribe, where 'tribe' is merely a descriptor, not part of the name.
Pluralization
Races, cultures and groups are always pluralized. Generic classes of non-sentient objects may be pluralized.
Example of pluralized titles:
Example on singular titles:
When referencing articles
Main article: Help:Editing
Note that [[Spell]]s will link to Spell but include the letter "s" in the anchor text. Making a redirect at Spells is therefore not necessary.
Also, [[Goblins|Goblin]] will link to Goblins but make "Goblin" the anchor text. This again removes the need for a redirect page at Goblin.
When using such forms, be sure to review your links and correct them if they do not work.
Top Level
The Encyclopedia classifies articles according to eleven top-level categories:
An article can be in several top-level categories. The Tower of Magi is in Geography as well as Magic. An article is placed into a category by adding the line [[Category:CATEGORY NAME]] at the end. Every in-character article must be in at least one top-level category.
There are three other categories that are listed along with the top-level categories, but treated differently:
The Empire and Avernum categories overlap broadly with all of the top-level categories, but any entry within one of them should also be in at least one regular top-level category.
Members of the OOC category are not normally part of other top-level categories, as all the other categories are for in-character entries.
Subcategories
Each top-level category contains several subcategories. The Herbarium, for example, contains:
Entries in subcategories are also in top category
An article that is part of a subcategory MUST be added to the top level category as well.
When describing a tree, the following must therefore be added at the end:
[[Category:Trees]] [[Category:Herbarium]]
Exceptions to the above rule
- Images are never added to any category except "maps". This is because images are displayed as thumbnails inside the category overview, which would slow the page load of the Geography category.
- Articles in subcategories of OOC are not necessarily added to OOC. Many subcategories of OOC serve as "labels" only, such as indicating that an article needs editing. Carrying an OOC label does not make the article itself OOC.
Browsing the Encyclopedia
If you are searching for an article and can't find it with the handy search form in the left side panel, you should try looking for it by category. From the main page, open one of the fifteen top-level categories under the heading "Browse the Encyclopedia by Topic". You can then see all articles in the chosen category. If you wish to narrow down the list of articles further, go to one of the subcategories listed, and the list will contain only the articles on this topic.