RuneScape Players Wiki:Manual of Style

The Manual of Style (abbreviated MoS or MOS) outlines a standard of consistent formatting for articles on this wiki.

Article titles

Titles should be recognisable, sufficiently precise, concise and consistent. The most common name of a player should typically be used as the title—even if it is not their current name—as it is recognisable. There are other points to remember when naming articles:

• Use "sentence case", not "title case"; that means, the first letter of a title should be capitalised. Otherwise, capital letters should be used as they would be used in a sentence (Players with level 9 Constitution not Players With Level 99 Constitution).
• Titles should normally be nouns or noun phrases: Early life not In early life.
• Do not use A, An or The as the first word unless required (Jagex Moderator not A Jagex Moderator).

Structure

Section organisation and headings

An article should begin with an introductory lead section, which does not contain a section heading. The lead should define the topic and summarise the body of the article. The body of the article is divided into sections, each with a section heading.

Equal signs are used to mark text as a section heading: ==Title== for a primary section; ===Title=== for the sub-section and so on. (Although =Title= would technically be the highest heading level, do not use it because it is reserved for the top-level heading containing the title of the article.)

The following apply to section headings:

• Headings should not contain links, images or questions.
• Headings should not refer redundantly to the subject of the article (RuneScape career instead of His RuneScape career when his refers to the subject of the article).

Trivia

Articles should not contain information that is not important in regards to its topic. Thus, trivia should be avoided in articles. A better way to organise an article is to provide a logical grouping of facts that provides context and smooth transitions.

Spelling and grammar

English dialects

Articles on the RuneScape Players Wiki should normally be written in British English. However, if an article is on a topic that has ties to an English-speaking nation, use the English of that nation. For example, if a player had strong ties to the United States, American English should be used.

Third-person pronouns

Avoid using first-person (I, my) or second-person pronouns (you, your) in articles. These types of pronouns are often ambiguous and contrary to the tone of an encyclopedia. Instead, use third person or the passive voice.

Tense

Different tenses should be used in different situations. Use past tense for historic events, future tense for upcoming events, and present tense if not time-based.

Abbreviations

When an abbreviation is to be used in an article, write out the full expression first, followed by the abbreviation in parentheses. In the rest of the article, the abbreviation can be used by itself.

Abbreviations are not usually separated by periods; however, there are exceptions. Abbreviations formed from Latin words often use periods (such as i.e., e.g.).

Do not use abbreviations that may interrupt the flow of the article or appear informal. For example, do not use approx. for approximate or approximately, except to reduce the width of a table or infobox the word appears in.

Bulleted and numbered lists

• Do not use lists if a passage is easily read in paragraph form.
• Do not leave blank lines between a bulleted or numbered list.
• Use numbers rather than bullets if:
  • the order of the list is important;
  • or the numbering has some sort of meaning.
• When the elements of a list are complete sentences, each one is formatted in sentence case (e.g., the initial letter is capitalised).
• When the elements are fragments, the list is usually introduced by a lead fragment ending with a colon.

Avoid repetition, jargon, redundancy and ambiguity

Do not repeat words

Repeating the same words over and over makes text sound dull. One way to avoid repetition is to replace a word with a synonym:

• Zezima discovered bananas and Yogosun discovered apples ... (too much repetition)
• Zezima discovered bananas and Yogosun found apples ... (better)

You can also replace one of the words with a pronoun:

• Player A intends to invite all his friends and party with each friend ... (too much repetition)
• Player A intends to invite all his friends and party with each of them ... (better)

Avoid jargon

Try to make articles accessible to as many readers as possible. Avoid using words such as 'interfacing' instead of 'communicating'. Writing should be clear and interesting.

Avoid redundancy (unnecessary words)

Too many words in an article can make a work less effective and dull. Do not add words that don't add any meaning to text or say the same things twice:

• push, not forcibly push; pushing is the act of exerting force on something
• unique, not very unique; something unique is the only one of its kind—there are not levels of uniqueness

Avoid ambiguity

Ambiguity is something open to more than one interpretation. Consider this example: Player A threw stones at Player B, and he started crying. He could refer to Player A or Player B, so it is important to specify which player he is referring to.

Images

• Use captions to clarify the relevance of an image to an article.
• It is preferable that a player in an image is facing toward the text.
• Images in the lead section should not be bigger than 250 pixels.
• Avoid referring to an image as being on the right or left. For some viewers, like some of those on mobile, an image may not be to the right or left of some text.
• Images should contain alternative text for text-only readers using the |alt= parameter. Alternative text is helpful in situations in which one is using a screen reader due to a visual impairment or one is using a browser configured not to read images. For example, for the following image, you might add

  [[File:Example.jpg|center|alt=Lotus bud against the leaf.]]

  which for a screen reader would render as: image hypertext Lotus bud against the leaf.

Links

Links should be relevant and helpful in the context of an article. You do not need to link to common terms that readers are likely to be familiar with. Excessive use of links are distracting and may slow readers down, and make maintenance more difficult.

Red links are acceptable if they point to a topic that has the potential to be an article in the future. However, if the link points to a topic unlikely to be created or not relevant, it should be removed.

External links

Articles can include external links at the very end, pointing to places readers can go for further information. The standard format for external links is a primary heading, ==External links==, followed by a bulleted list of links. Identify the link and its relevance to the article.

Footnotes

Footnotes (created using <ref></ref> tags) can be used in articles to add explanations and, more commonly, references (see Citing sources). The <ref> tags should immediately follow the text to which they refer. When the text coincides with a punctuation, the tag is placed immediately after the punctuation. Mulptiple tags do not have space between them.

• For example: Zezima made it onto the list of biggest role models in a study done by Cartoon Network's New Generations 2007 show.

See also

• Featured articles