Style Guide

This article aims to provide a comprehensive style guide for all The Cycle: Frontier Wiki articles to follow.

Notability

 * General
 * 1) Articles must contain enough information to warrant a full page. If they do not have enough content, they should be merged with other similar articles.
 * 2) Articles must pertain directly to The Cycle: Frontier in some way.


 * Wiki Rules
 * 4. Parody, comedic, nonsense, hoax, and speculation articles, or any other article that could mislead players are not allowed to be created.

Articles in the "User:" namespace are exempt from the general guidelines. They can be used for anything, provided they follow the other wiki rules. However, it is still strongly recommended that they are kept clean as to not clog up maintenance categories, as such userpages may be eligible for blanking upon inactivity of the user.

Redirects
Redirects are exempt from the normal notability, but must redirect to an article that fits the notability guidelines. Redirects can be created if they fit one of the following:
 * Alternative naming of the title, such as "Jeff" for "marauder".
 * Incorrect spelling, typos, and irregular formatting are not allowed.
 * Previous article title, including if the article was moved to another wiki.
 * An exception is if the previous title was not commonly used.
 * Alternative capitalization or form, including changing the title to plural case.

Redirects in the user namespace may lead anywhere, except to an article that does not exist or another redirect.

Article titles
Article titles should generally be in the singular form, except in-game features with plural names (e.g. creatures) or overview article (e.g. Weapons, Backpacks etc.).

Articles should follow a general naming format based on the type.
 * Articles about gear, loot and creature in-game should use the in game name capitalized as it appears in game.
 * If the article is about multiple things in the game, the title should equally represent all the titles. For example, an article about all types of guns would be called Weapons.
 * If the article's type is unlisted, it should use the most relevant title in sentence case, not title case, unless it is a proper noun. This also applies to some non-article pages such as categories, templates, and project pages.

Writing
This wiki's purpose is to document facts. Therefore, always avoid personal commentary, speculation, and unsourced information. Generally speaking, information does not require sources if they can directly be seen in-game or are otherwise obvious. Other information however, such as quotes from Yager employees and information that is not widely known, must be sourced with a proper reference. The citation needed template should be placed after any information that requires a source. Do not add content to an article without a proper source.

Articles in the main namespace should always be written in the third-person perspective and without terms referential to the reader ("you", "your", etc.). The exception to this is tutorial pages, where in most cases "you" is the most appropriate pronoun to use when referring to the player. Try not to use abbreviations of words either. For instance, sentences like "You can drop as a squad with up to 2 other players, for a total of 3.." should be written as "Players can drop as a squad with up to 2 other players, for a total of 3."

Bolding
To emphasize points, italics should be used, not bold or ALL CAPS. Bolding should exclusively be used when the article title is mentioned in the text. For instance, an article page with the title  should have Bluetail bolded for any instance it appears within the description?"

Tutorial information should be present only in tutorial articles. This includes navigational features of UIX elements. Tutorials may be linked from other articles if relevant though.

Keeping articles concise and up to date
In short, articles should contain only information that is up to date, i.e., implemented in the latest patch of the game. Anything that is outdated should be moved to the History section of the article. When something changes, note the change in the History section and remove the outdated information from other sections of the article. It is unnecessary to mention when a particular feature was implemented; this is once again reserved for the History section of the article.

Quotes
All quotes should be copied verbatim. Any additional content added within the quotation marks must be enclosed in square brackets. Terminal punctuation must go inside the quote only if it is in the original; otherwise, it must go outside. If the quote contains an error that was present in the original, add sic after that text to show readers that it is not a transcription mistake.

Spelling
Pages on the wiki should use American English unless the in-game name is British English. For instance, "colour" should be "color", "behaviour" should be "behavior", "centre" should be "center", and so on.

Do capitalize
Weapons names should always be capitalized.
 * Weapons

Example:
 * The Phasic Lancer is an weapon.

Section headings

 * Article main sections should start with level 2 headings and increase by one for subsections. Never use a level 1 heading ; this is reserved for the article title.
 * Follow sentence style capitalization, not title style, so only the first letter of the heading and proper nouns are capitalized.
 * Headings should not have links or templates in them; links should be placed underneath, such as in a Main template.
 * Although not required, having one space between sections and one space between the equal signs and the section name improves readability.
 * Place any hatnotes and images immediately under the section heading, and then a space after those before the section content.
 * Do not add blank sections unless tagged with empty section to request prompt expansion.
 * For information on which sections should be in which order, see the Article layout section of this style guide.

Italics
Any instance of "The Cycle: Frontier" should be in italics. Any instance of the name of a videogame should also be in italics. For instance: "Satisfactory".

Images
Image captions should not have periods at the end, unless the phrase is a full sentence.

Images added to articles should fit the following guidelines:
 * Images should showcase an attribute of the article's topic.

Linking

 * For a complete guide to linking, please refer to Wikipedia's Manual of Style for links, although do note that some of the policies about linking listed there are different than many here.

The use of links is a difficult balance between providing readers enough useful links to allow them to "wander through" articles and excessive linking that can distract them from their reading flow.

Underlinking can cause the reader to become frustrated because questions may arise about the article's contents, which can be resolved only by using the search option or other sources for clarification, interrupting and distracting the reader.

Overlinking may distract the reader because links are usually colored differently causing the eye to shift focus constantly. Additionally, if the same word is linked multiple times in the same paragraph it can cause the reader to question if the links are directing them to different articles or not.

The guidelines for linking are:


 * No more than 10 percent of the words in an article are contained in links.
 * Unless it affects the sentence's wording and readability in a negative way, two links should not be next to each other in the text so that it looks like one link.
 * Links for any single term should not be excessively repeated in the same article. Excessive linking is defined as linking the same term multiple times within a portion of text that can fit on a typical viewer's screen. Remember, the purpose of links is to direct the reader to a new spot at the point(s) where the reader is most likely to take a temporary detour due to needing more information.
 * Duplicating an important link distant from a previous occurrence in an article may well be appropriate. If an important term appears many times in a long article, but is linked only once at the beginning of the article, it may actually be underlinked. Indeed, readers who jump directly to a subsection of interest must still be able to find a link. But take care in fixing such problems, the distance between duplicate links is an editor's preference; however, if in doubt, duplicate the term further down the article.

Linking to a redirect is preferred over using a piped link except in templates and other pages that are transcluded. When a piped link is unavoidable, it should not point to a redirect. If a redirect can be avoided using a suffix on the link, that is preferred. E.g. Using  instead of   is desired.

Date formatting
The Cycle: Frontier Wiki is an international community. That is a good thing in general, but it makes a problem for numeric abbreviations of dates, such as "12/10/11": while most countries abbreviate dates as day/month/year, some Asian countries use year/month/day, and the US uses month/day/year. So the above date could represent any of three different dates. To avoid this problem, most dates should be written in "Month DD, YYYY" format, e.g. "December 10, 2011". Do not use superscripts or suffixes such as "April 23rd" or "4th of May". If a numeric or terse date is needed (such as in a table), then use YYYY-MM-DD, always with 2 digits for month and day (e.g., 2011-12-10 or 2012-05-04). Besides being the ISO standard, dates in this format naturally sort properly, say if the table column is later made sortable.

Try to avoid seasons for dates such as "Summer 2021" or "Fall 2022". On Earth, the northern and southern hemispheres have opposite seasons. Instead use phrases like "Mid-2021" or "Late 2022".

Files
File names should be consistent so they are easier to find. Files used in the infobox of articles should be titled with the exact name of the subject as seen ingame using en-US (when possible). Filenames should increment by 1 for each new image of the same subject added using the format: 00, 01, 02, etc. This does not apply if the image only has minor changes. In such cases, overriding the old image is warranted.

For example, the image name for a KARLA would go as follows:
 * "KARLA 01.png"
 * "KARLA 02.png" (assuming the KARLA has gone under a significant redesign)

Article layout
For the sake of consistency, all articles of a specific type should follow a general layout.
 * 1) Hatnotes (i.e. notes that belong at the very top of an article page)
 * 2) Message boxes
 * 3) Infoboxes
 * 4) Introduction with a general description
 * 5) Article body
 * 6) See also
 * 7) Notes and references
 * 8) Applicable footer navboxes
 * 9) DEFAULTSORT
 * 10) Categories
 * 11) Interwikis

Be smart when adding a message box: too many boxes at the top of a page or a section is not useful. If there is already one, move the ones that are not necessary for the reader lower on the page, for example in a relevant section or at the end.