Help:Style guide

Following is a "style guide" to be taken into consideration when working on articles. Please read the other pages in our help section as well!

Use the preview button

At the bottom of the editing box, next to the "Save page" button, is another button which reads "Show preview". This allows you to see what your changes look like when rendered by the Wiki software. You can re-read your work and look for errors in your Wiki code without saving the page to the database. For example, you can check that your wikilinks are formatted properly or that an image you added is where you wanted it to be. Then, when you are done, you can use the save button to update the page on the site.

Using preview before saving avoids creating a string of entries in the page's history and the Special:Recentchanges list, making those pages much easier for other editors to read and understand.

Minor and major edits

If you are making only a small change to an article, such as correcting spelling, inserting a single word, wikifying, or adding categories... mark the change as a minor edit when you save the page. Anything that changes the content or meaning of the article should not be marked as a minor edit.

The purpose of marking something as a minor edit is that other editors of the Wiki can choose to "hide" minor edits when they look at page histories or the Special:Recentchanges page.

Always use the summary box

While editing a page, please be sure to fill in the summary box with something useful. Don't simply say "made some changes." Summaries like "spelling fixes" or "removed vandalism" are fine. It is especially important to include an edit summary if you are reversing another editor's work -- you should explain why you are doing it. Writing edit summaries helps other editors keep track of the changes that being made.

Link once

Not every instance of, for example, "Bumblebee" on a page needs to link to the Bumblebee page. Generally only the first occurrence of a word should be turned into a link. In a long article, if it has been several paragraphs since an instance of a particular word, it can be linked again if it seems likely that somebody may wish to know more about that word after reading the new sentence.

Tone and voice

This is an information site. It generally should be written in the third person and with a moderately "formal" voice. (See Wikipedia for examples.) To whit:

• Don't sign your edits. All contributions are appreciated, but we don't want the pages getting filled up with signatures. If you'd like to take credit for a post, do it on your user page.
• Please check your spelling and grammar. Don't use Internet slang (c u 2nite) or leetspeek in your articles. To save others the trouble of correcting you, please spellcheck your articles before you post them.
• Don't use "smilies" or emoticons.
• Don't "reply" to content others have posted. If you think a particular point warrants discussion, post on the article's discussion page. If you're absolutely sure that something should be changed and don't think a discussion is necessary, just change it.
• Don't leave notes or instructions to future editors like "Add more information here if you find it". Again, use the article's discussion page for that.

That said, there is room for humor. An occasional joke within article text is alright, although any particular joke may not receive wide acceptance by other editors, and might be removed. It is, however, rather common for self-explanatory images to be given "joke" captions. Character portraits, for example, often have a silly comment written under them. This is fine. Additionally, there are a few articles on the Wiki which are essentially one long joke. Spider-Man, Tracks, and Wheelie are examples.

Images

Whenever possible, include an image relating to the article. Pictures should be no larger than around 100 KB, and should have a meaningful file name (megatron_shoots_starscream.jpg, not trans_pic.jpg). Please optimize your graphics for the web and post in either PNG or JPEG format, not GIF and especially not BMP.

Cite sources

Transformers fiction is broad and sprawling, such that even devoted fans can be unfamiliar with large portions of it. If you reference something which you have reason to think is not going to be "common knowledge" to a great many fans, please state where the information comes from. For example, references to Buster Witwicky having a gambling problem should explicitly mention that this information comes from the Keepers Trilogy novels published by iBooks in the early 2000s. If you are going to describe, say, the location and nature of the Rust Sea, you should note where that information is coming from.

This serves several purposes: It lends credibility to the article. It allows interested readers to find more information by checking the primary source. It sets up a "paper trail" of sorts so that other users can check up on statements that surprise them or sound unlikely. It also helps to establish the range of applicability of the information. If an article states that energon is a multi-molecule substance which includes atoms of an element also called energon, that may seem like "important" information that has wide-ranging canonical implications. However, if the source of that information is an obscure comic book by a small independant publisher (in this case one of the 3D comics from Blackthorne) its relevance to the Transformers multiverse as a whole can be guaged as relatively low.

If it can be done unobtrusively, simply make your reference in the text of the article. If doing so would be awkward (for example, breaking the fourth wall in a character bio) there are two currently "approved" methods of citing sources:

1. Use the Wiki software's footnotes mechanism which is explained on Wikipedia.
2. Use Template:Storylink to create a margin note.

Similarly, if you are uploading an image (art, photo, screencap, whatever), please state where the image comes from (issue number, episode title, book name, etc.) and the name of the original artist if known. If you don't know who drew it or where it's from, then at least provide a link in the image upload information telling us where on the web you found it. It is important that artists get credit for their work, and also that users of the Wiki can find the image on their own if they wish to get a better look at it.

For citing sources of images, include the citation in your upload summary (which becomes the "text" of the Image's article and can be edited later), and also include one of our copyright templates to acknowledge that we do not own the image.

Use of text from other sources

Do not simply copy and paste information from other websites or from official character bios. We do not want character pages to simply be retreads of their tech spec cards or profiles from comic books.

This even includes Wikipedia -- content from Wikipedia may be used here legally, as both sites are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, but we would prefer for the content of this Wiki to be original. Feel free to use other websites for reference or even for ideas about what to write, but please compose your own text.

You may, of course, copy and paste text from another place if you are the original author of that text. If you do this, it is recommended that you say so in your edit summary so other editors don't revert your work upon realizing it was pasted from elsewhere.

Use sections and subsections

Articles which are more than two or three paragraphs should usually be split up into sections. The Wikimedia software allows for easy creation of three levels of section headings, simply by placing equals signs around text (see Help:Editing#Organizing your writing).

Articles should begin with a paragraph or two of general statements before the first section begins. If an article has more than three sections, the software will automatically generate a table of contents for the article using the section names. This makes your article much easier to navigate.

Do not try to create your own headings by simply bolding the text, as this sort of heading will not appear in the table of contents.

Categorize

Please categorize every page as best you can. At the bottom of each page, simply add [[Category:The Category]]. A list of categories is maintained in the special pages. Ideally, every article on the Wiki should be findable simply by browsing the category tree without ever typing anything in the search box.

Capitalization rules

Article and section titles do not need to have all of their "important" words capitalized as in a book title. Capitalize only the first word and any words that are always capitalized, such as proper names. If an article or section is named after a title, of course, its capitalization should match that of the title. Hence, The Bridge to Nowhere.

Creating wikilinks

Article titles can have spaces in them, but the URL for the article will use underscores instead. When writing a wikilink, you do not need to use underscores. Doing so won't hurt anything, but is pointless.

Additionally, all article titles must begin with a capital letter due to the software/database structure. However, when linking to an article, the wikilink itself need not begin that way. So, for a term which is not normally capitalized, such as "energon", one can simply write [[energon]] even though the article title is "Energon". Writing [[Energon|energon]] is unneccessary. Article titles are case-sensitive, however, so when writing links it is only for the first letter of an article name that you can ignore the proper case.

Titles

In an article's text, names of franchises, toylines, cartoon series, and comic series should be italicized. (Put them between pairs of apostrophes, like ''Beast Machines''.) Names of comic issues and cartoon episodes should be put in quotation marks. Abbreviated titles do not need italics or quotes.

Talk/discussion pages

Organize the posts

If a Talk page has discussions of more than one topic in it, you may want to organize the posts by topic and create section headings in the page to make the discussions easier to follow.

Sign your Talk posts

If you make a post on a discussion page, please sign it. If you have a user account, this is as easy as typing ~~~~ at the end of your post. If you don't have a user account, just sign it with your name or nickname so everybody can tell who's who when reading long conversations. Even better, create an account anyway and use the signature method described. There really is no reason not to create an account if you're going to stick around.

Leave an extra line between long posts

Sometimes a post to a Talk page will need to be more than one paragraph long. It can be hard to tell at a glance whether a set of paragraphs is a single long post or several small posts, as most people place their signature at the end of their last line instead of on a new line. Adding an extra blank line between posts, however, makes a large blank space in the rendered page, so that it is easy to tell the two apart.

Page-specific standards

For all types of page, DO NOT write your opinion of the item in question. For example, do not state that a particular cartoon series was a bad series, that a particular character is totally badass, or that one version of a toy is "better" than another (unless you are making an obvious joke or exaggeration for the purpose of humor). We'd like to keep the Wiki restricted to just the facts.

The beginning of an article

Many articles deal with characters, ideas or entities that exist in many different continuities (usually within a single continuity family, but not always). Such articles should begin with a one-sentence, italicized clarifying statement that indicates the applicability of the article. For character pages, the statement should be very similar in form to the following: "[CHARACTER] is a [FACTION/SUBGROUP/SPECIES] from [CONTINUITY (FAMILY) OF ORIGIN]." For example:

Sunstreaker is an Autobot in the Generation 1 continuity family.

After this continuity statement, write an overview of the topic which summarizes the essential features of the topic, synthesizing the portrayals across (sub-)continuities. Be careful not to overdo the generalizations to the point that they become inaccurate. Following the summary, dive into the main article, with sections devoted to the portrayals in each relevant continuity.

The first instance of the article's subject (after the continuity statement) should be written in boldface text. (Surround the text with three apostrophes on each side.)

TV episodes

Each episode should have its own page. For episodes that aired in both the US and Japan, cover the US version primarily, and state any differences in the Japanese version on the same page.

A fairly complete episode page which can be used as a guide is the Beast Wars episode, "The Agenda, Part 1". It has all of the appropriate sections, and even notes when a particular section is empty. Follow the format of that article as closely as possible.

Comic stories

Each comic story should have its own article (specific issue articles are not mandated in multiple-issue story arcs, but if feasible, such may be desirable). Stories are (generally) linked according to title, and referenced according to country of initial publication. For a standard example of format, consult the page for Marvel US issue #25, titled "Gone But Not Forgotten." Creators of comic pages are reminded to make sure that links on the appropriate publisher page properly connect to the page that has been created.

Marvel US and Marvel UK

For the most part, the Marvel US comics can be seen as a subset of the Marvel UK comics. Nearly everything that was published in the US was also published in the UK, but some material was published only in the UK. In order to alleviate the need for separate US and UK comic sections in character histories, a convention has been established where UK-exclusive material is included inline with the rest of the comic material, but is written entirely in italics. Entries which use this convention should provide a reminder at the top of the Marvel comics section along the lines of Material exclusive to the UK comics is written in italics.

Creators

Pages on real humans who worked on Transformers, such as TV show and comic writers, graphic artists, toy designers, and voice actors need only contain a description of their work on Transformers, not everything they've ever done. The article on Frank Welker, for example, should not provide a complete career filmography. On the other hand, an external link to a complete filmography at IMDB is quite appropriate.

Lists

List pages should be added to the lists category. Their content should be broken down by franchise, G1 and G2 first, followed by Beast Wars/Beast Machines, then Robots in Disguise, Unicron Trilogy, and a final (if necessary) "Other" category.

Within each larger category, please break down individual entries by faction, with Autobots first, Decepticons second (or Maximals and Predacons where necessary), followed by any other necessary "Other" categories.

From Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki, a Wikia wiki.