Terraria Wiki:Manual of Style

Page shortcuts: TW:MoS, TW:STYLE This page details a Terraria Wiki guideline. Unlike a policy, this guideline acts as a set of best practices which should generally be followed. Guidelines are established and maintained by administrators on the behalf of the community. To learn how to propose changes to Terraria Wiki guidelines, please see Terraria Wiki:Policy#Proposing policy changes.

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This Manual of Style outlines general formatting, spelling, grammar, and style conventions for articles on this wiki. The guidelines established here should be followed for clean and consistent presentation of content.

Article titles

• The first letter of every major word (that is, not an article (a, an, the) or preposition (of, by, in)) in a title should be capitalized.
• Titles should be singular rather than plural.
  • Example: Jester's Arrow instead of Jester's Arrows
  • Exception: Pages which refer to a general subset of items or monsters (such as Swords) can be plural.
• Titles should match what an entity is called in-game. If an entity is unnamed in-game, then its article should be titled by what it is generally known as in the Terraria community (eg. Hellevator).

Redirects

• Articles with improper titles should be made into redirects to pages with proper titles. Improper titles can be anything from common misspellings of an entity's name (eg. Eye of Cthulu instead of Eye of Cthulhu) to articles with improper capitalization (eg. Horseman's blade instead of Horseman's Blade).
• Alternate versions of an article's title should be made into redirects to said article.
  • Example: Corrupt redirects to The Corruption.
• Titles for specific game concepts which there isn't enough information to write full pages about should be made into redirects to a page which encompasses several of such (related) concepts.
  • Example: The titles of all individual weapon/accessory prefixes (such as legendary and forceful) redirect to the reforging page.

Style of writing

• Articles should be written in the third person (ie. pronouns used should be he, she, or it; "the player" or the like should be used instead of "you", etc.).
  • In cases where third person language is awkward (such as the technical info found on this page), limited usage of second person language is acceptable.
• Except where a specific character with a definite gender is referred to, language used should be gender-neutral.
• Articles should not contain slang, colloquialisms, profanity, or personal opinions, and should use good grammar and proper spelling.
• Common abbreviations for entities should only be used after the full name of the entity has already been used in the article or section.
  • Example: The Eye of Cthulhu can be referred to as the "EoC" only after "Eye of Cthulhu" has appeared on the page.
• Long strings of text should be broken into paragraphs. For particularly long strings of text, separating the paragraphs into subsections may be appropriate.
• Note that American English spelling conventions are the standard here.
  • Example: Color instead of colour
  • Exception: Entities should be named as they are in-game. Items or monsters which use British spellings of words should be titled and referred to as such on this wiki.
    • Example: Spectre Armor instead of Specter Armor

Formatting

Capitalization

• Item and monster names should be regarded as proper nouns and should always be capitalized.
  • Examples: Green Slime instead of green slime, Mythril Helmet instead of mythril helmet
• Biome names (eg. the Corruption, the Hallow) should always be capitalized, but adjectives referring to such biomes (eg. corrupt, hallowed) should usually not be.
• Names of entities which are common nouns should not be capitalized, even if they are capitalized in the article's title.
  • Examples:
    • "Terraria has a robust crafting system." instead of "Terraria has a robust Crafting system."
    • "Pumps can be used to move lava to the surface." instead of "Pumps can be used to move Lava to the surface."
    • "The most powerful sword in the game is the Terra Blade." instead of "The most powerful Sword in the game is the Terra Blade."

Emphasis and text decorations

• The first instance of the topic of an article in the article's main body (that is, not in an infobox, image, table, or the like) should always be bolded. Any later occurrences should not be bolded.
• In order to not clash with the above standard, italicizing (syntax: ''<italictext>'') or underlining (syntax: <u><underlinedtext></u>) words or phrases for emphasis where needed is recommended over bolding them. ALL CAPS should never be used for emphasis.
• Text which is colored in-game can appear in a similar color where it is noted on the wiki, provided that it is still easily legible. Otherwise, use of colored text should be minimal.
  • Example: "The Blood Moon is rising..." could be colored a legible light green on the Blood Moon page.

Infoboxes

• On pages that use them, the infobox should be at the very top of the page. The only things which should be placed above an infobox are certain templates such as {{Cleanup}}, {{Stub}}, or {{Unreleased Content}}.
• Parameters which are unknown or unavailable should be left out of the template.
  • Exception: If an image is unavailable for an entity, then the appropriate placeholder image can be used in the infobox with a caption of "Placeholder - upload a new file".
• Images used in item infoboxes should usually be sized to 52px by 52px. Image sizes default to 100%, so in most cases, resolution should not be specified.
  • Sample code: [[File:Item 274.png|75px]]

Links

• Links should be internal rather than external, where possible.
  • Example: [[Green Slime]] instead of [http://terraria.wikia.com/wiki/Green_Slime Green Slime]
• Efficiency in linking (using redirects rather than pipelinking, for instance) is generally preferred to always linking to the full title of an article.
  • Examples:
    • "Throwing Vile Powder onto a Bunny will [[corrupt]] it." instead of "Throwing Vile Powder on a Bunny will [[The Corruption|corrupt]] it."
    • "Being hit by an Armored Bones has a chance of inflicting the player with [[Broken Armor]]." instead of "Being hit by an Armored Bones has a chance of inflicting the player with [[Debuffs#Broken Armor|Broken Armor]]."
• Links that need pluralization should be done so at the end of the regular link, and not pipelinked with the additional plural word.
  • Example: [[Crystal Shard]]s instead of [[Crystal Shard|Crystal Shards]]
• Links to any single other page should be made no more than once per section and should generally be added to the first occurrence of the title of the other page.
  • Example:
    • "In order to enter the Jungle Temple, the player would need a Temple Key...The boss of the Jungle Temple is the Golem." rather than "In order to enter the Jungle Temple, the player would need a Temple Key...The boss of the Jungle Temple is the Golem."

Sections

• Most sections should be level two headings (syntax: ==<headingtext>==). A subsection should be one level higher (that is, formatted with one more pair of equals signs) than the section it is below.
• Section titles should be kept as short as possible.

Order of page elements

• Pages should be arranged in the following order:
  1. Certain templates should be placed at the very top of a page:
     • {{Unreleased Content}}
     • {{Stub}}
     • {{Cleanup}}
     • {{PlatformExclusive}}
       • {{Mobile}}
       • {{Console}}
  2. Infoboxes should be placed immediately below such templates.
  3. Up to a few introductory paragraphs which contain the most relevant gameplay information about an entity should be directly below the infobox.
  4. After the introductory paragraph(s), information can be arranged under several sections, starting with sections which are exclusive to any given page (such as "Strategy" sections for most boss pages) and then going in the following order:
     1. Notes – Important/useful gameplay information which doesn't fit in the introductory paragraphs of an article
     2. Trivia – Information which is not strictly gameplay-related, such as references to other media or notes about an item's qualities in comparison with others of its type
     3. Bugs – Self-explanatory
     4. Update Info – History of the entity throughout the Version History of Terraria
        • The Update Info section should contain all info directly relating to the history of an entity. This info should be placed in the {{UpdateInfo}} template (or one of it variants, for console- or mobile-exclusive content), and should be arranged in reverse chronological order (ie. most recent update first).
     5. Gallery – Images relating to the subject of the article
  5. Any navbox templates and interlanguage links should be the last things on a page.

Media

This is formatting information for images and videos. For general policies regarding these, see TW:IMAGE and TW:VIDEO.

Images

• Images should always be placed below infoboxes. Most of the time, they should also be placed below the introductory paragraphs on a page.
• Images should be aligned next to the text where they are most relevant whenever possible.
• Images which are relevant to a page as a whole rather than a particular part of the page should be placed in a gallery at the bottom of the page.
• If an image has a caption, it should be relevant to the page and the image.

Videos

• On pages with videos, one video should be placed under the first paragraph of the page. This video should be 330-350 pixels in size and should have no other formatting (positioning, thumbs, etc.) or captions.
  • Example: [[Video:Terraria - Crafting 101|none|350px]]
• If a page is to have multiple videos on it, then only the main video should be formatted as above. The rest should be in a gallery (separate from the image gallery) at the bottom of the page.

Mod namespace

In addition to all other guidelines in the Manual of Style, the following guidelines apply when editing in the Mod namespace:

• Articles in the Mod namespace should never be added to "vanilla" Terraria categories, as it is not desirable to mix mod content with content that is in the official version of the game.
  • Example: Mod:Hallowed Ore should not be added to Category:Ore
• Articles in the Mod namespace such as Mod:Reborn Mod may need to use an appropriate mod header chosen from Category:Mod header templates.