Help talk:Style guide

Some suggested changes

It says I should discuss them here first, so here goes:

1. Remove contractions like don't, you'll etc.
2. Singular name for wiki articles:
   1. Hearthstone Wiki uses redirects instead of [[foo]]s for Quest and Golden card.
   2. Why do we use plural for e.g. Abilities?
3. Should we suggest using Template:Cite web for references?

-- Karol007 (talk) 16:23, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

I think the "discuss here first" was meant to refer to changes to existing POLICY, or brand new policies that aren't currently being followed :) The contraction and cite web notes sound great to me!

As to pluralization and other redirect/alias issues, I think the general rule is to use singular article naming, redirects for people who go to the wrong place or don't know how to use linktrails, and to use linktrails wherever appropriate instead of relying on redirects. Or at least, that's what I do :) So redirects become a "they're there if someone needs them but we try not to need them" feature - redirects do involve extra server requests, the notice at the top adds clutter, and tooltips don't work, so bypassing them is a good idea when convenient. If you were under the impression "linktrails" like [[foo]]s didn't work here, well...they do! I can definitely link to Quests that way. Obviously if I've been wrong to use them this whole time, just let me know...

I'm not sure what you meant with Abilities; it's a case where using linktrails doesn't work and it is an extra pain for editors to use a whole piped link so many just take the redirect shortcut. Again, there are downsides to that but they're not severe. - jerodast (talk) 18:50, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Jerodast is pretty much correct :) Firstly, sorry for not replying sooner... I remember reading this last year but it got buried under the mountain of other things to get back to at the time and obviously got lost!

Since we're discussing it, I should first mention that as you can see from the edit history, this page was written by myself in the space of a few hours, way back in November 2013. I wanted to make it because of anticipating edit wars, and debates over conventions and standardisation; the main reason I anticipated this was that at that time the site was a real mess! There were a range of different styles and conventions even just on the card pages, and people overwriting each other's styles according to their own tastes. I wanted to start standardising things, but there were no official guidelines of any kind to settle arguments or stop people reverting each other's edits endlessly.

I therefore made this page, with some mostly pretty obvious guidelines, chiefly singular page titles, date conventions, section headers in sentence case, etc, and got on with wrangling the site into shape - I haven't revisited it since.

As a historical note, it turned out this page wasn't really necessary, although it was probably useful for my own sense of confidence. The style of the wiki ended up mostly being determined by the very simple factor of who could actually be bothered to pour hundreds of hours of work into expanding, filling out and standardising it. Once a single, consistent style was established, editors mostly started helping to bring the remaining sections in line with the rest :) Of course there have been layout changes over the years, but following oOeyes' advice, this kind of information is intentionally absent from this page.

The note about not just editing the guide was likewise intended to stop angry editors from simply "rewriting the rules", and force them to discuss things first. It's okay to edit the guide to reflect our current style, or for general writing purposes; but if you really disagree with and propose changing a rule we currently follow, it's definitely better to discuss it first!

I agree with Jerodast re: redirects vs 'linktrails' (?). I don't think we need to go round deleting pluralisation redirects, but they shouldn't be needed (in most cases).

Re: Abilities, I'm not sure if the question is about the link or the title? If it's about the title, note that I moved the page to Ability back in January. The article title was previously plural, but it seemed to be bothering some people so I moved it over.

You can read Wikipedia's approach to singular vs plural here and mostly here. Honestly after re-reading this, it seems Ability probably should indeed be Abilities; there is now some content about what an ability actually is, but it is mostly a list of abilities. Likewise we have Patches rather than Patch, since the page is mostly a list. The conceptual distinction's still a bit fuzzy, though.

I've added a little more to the References section, chiefly explaining the reasons they're worth adding. I haven't gone into too much detail, though, since this isn't really a subject for the style guide, more for a helpful 'how to' guide. I've been planning on adding an editor's handbook detailing procedures and things like this for quite a while, and if I do get round to it I'll link it from pages like this. -- Taohinton (talk) 23:32, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

In my first draft of my reply I called them "link suffixes" since they are "things you add after" (suffixes) links (links). But then I worried people wouldn't know what I meant so I looked to see if there was an official term for that kind of link and found a single reference to "linktrail rules" at MediaWiki's link help page. In retrospect I don't know why on Earth I thought that would be clearer since I've never heard the word before :) I suppose "word-ending links" is a perfectly fine term and much more intelligible! - jerodast (talk) 23:42, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Capitalization

This article should address whether game terms such as keywords, "attack" or "mana" be capitalized. As the existing ruling regarding classes is to follow the grammatical rules rather than the game's conventions, I think the game terminology should similarly not be capitalized. Blue Banana whotookthisname (talk) 08:41, 28 March 2021 (UTC)