This Manual of Style is a guide applicable to all CyberAcme articles. It reflects CyberAcme's standards, and is intended to help editors to produce articles with language, layout, and formatting that are consistent, clear, and precise. The goal of CyberAcme is to make the whole encyclopedia easier, intuitive to use and the most definitive source for all Marathon information.
General
Editing
It is recommended that you should know how to perform copy editing and content editing. Copy editing requires the basic knowledge of the English language. This covers from correcting spelling and grammar errors, using the proper verbs tense and fixing common punctuation mistakes. On the other hand, content editing expands this knowledge by assessing whether the written content meets the standards of a good encyclopedic entry. Elements of a good encyclopedic entry are explored further in the following sections.
Do not copy-paste content
The best practice while editing the wiki is to avoid pasting the information you copied from a source. When it comes to article content, you should (learn to) rewrite the information you have come across in your research, using your own words, as opposed to copying the source word-for-word. Fragments of official content may be copied verbatim for the sake of quotations; however, they must also be presented as such.
Internal consistency
An overriding principle is that style and formatting choices should be consistent within a CyberAcme article, though not necessarily throughout CyberAcme as a whole. Consistency within an article promotes clarity and cohesion.
Stability of articles
Editors should not change an article from one guideline-defined style to another without a substantial reason unrelated to mere choice of style, and that revert-warring over optional styles is unacceptable. Where there is disagreement over which style to use in an article, start a discussion on the talk page of the article and try to find ways to overcome the issue.
Follow the sources
Many points of usage, such as the treatment of proper names, can be decided by observing the style adopted by high-quality sources. Unless there is a clear reason to do otherwise, follow the usage of reliable English-language secondary sources on the subject. If the sources can be shown to be unrepresentative of current English usage, follow current English usage instead—and consult more sources.
Clarity
Writing should be clear and concise. Plain English works best: avoid jargon, and vague or unnecessarily complex wording. Remember, the encyclopedia is aimed at late high school, early college reading proficiency, and general educational levels. Articles should be fully comprehensible to non-specialists.
Nomenclature
There is tension between the academic approach that names and classifies by the perspective of the field, and the layman's approach that uses common names and classifies according to common practice. We should try to accommodate the layman's approach wherever possible and avoid needlessly field-specific jargon.
Capitalization
As a general rule, CyberAcme follows the most common capitalization standard found in official canon material. If official sources provide contradictory information, the most common, most recent, or most grammatically correct spelling should be preferred depending on the nature of the subject in question.
In general, the second or subsequent words in article and category titles should not be capitalized unless the title is a proper noun that would always be capitalized, even in the middle of a sentence.
Because of the wiki's formatting, the first word of article titles is always capitalized on top of the page even if that term would not be capitalized in running text.
Styles
Much of the styles you see in this manual of style is based on Wikipedia's manual of style, however in some cases CyberAcme will differ from Wikipedia. The following specific style conventions will be used by CyberAcme:
- Spelling: CyberAcme has no preference as to whether to use American English or British English - however, once one style is defined within an article it should be employed consistently. Article titles, however, still preference American spellings.
- Italics: titles of any media and ships in the Marathon universe should always be italicized. An exception to this would be those for citation purposes.
- Boldface: in any article introduction, the article's title/name must be bolded. The introduction title/name should not have links within them.
- Measurement: unless presented as such, always use the Metric system over US customary units as the primary measurement. Make sure to present the US customary units in brackets after the metric system (i.e. 130 kg (286 lbs), 2.18 meters (7'2")).
Perspectives in articles
Articles in CyberAcme use two perspectives: In-universe and Real-world.
Articles and sections written from an in-universe point of view are presented as though the information in canon sources were factual, much like how record-keepers within the Marathon universe might document their world and the events within. Real-world content use an out-of-universe perspective.
Phrases like "his ultimate fate is unknown" or "what happened to the ship after that is a mystery" should not be included in most cases in which the subject's fate is simply not covered in released media. However, if the subject's status is unknown to the characters in-universe (or has been specifically noted in official media), this is acceptable to mention in the article.
All articles are to be written in the third person; avoid addressing the reader directly as "you", etc. It is acceptable to make an exception to this on walkthrough pages, which by their nature are written to guide the reader.
Article focus and scope
As a general rule, content overlap between articles should be avoided. Wiki articles ideally form interlinked tree structures in which additional information on a given topic can be accessed through links. For example, a character's biography should only recount that character's involvement in an event, rather than every detail about the event itself beyond what is necessary to establish context. If the event has its own article, readers can learn more about the details of the event on its own page while the biography should focus on information that is most relevant to the character in question. This applies to other topics as well.
However, editors may apply their own discretion in balancing the level of detail covered by an article with the overall amount of information available on the subject.
Do not use conversational style
As CyberAcme is an open encyclopedia site, it should read like an online encyclopedia. To be more specific, it should be something like Wikipedia.
- Check your spelling and grammar. Do not use internet slang (ex. "How r u?" or "c u 2nite"). If you are not 100% sure about the way a word is spelled, type it into Google or Dictionary.com. If you know that you are not the strongest speller, compose your edits in a word processor like Microsoft Word or use an Internet browser like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome, which has spell-checking built in.
- Do not "reply" to content others have posted. If you think a particular point warrants discussion, post on the article's talk page. If you are 100% sure that something should be changed and do not think a discussion is necessary, just change it. Dialogue goes only on discussion pages.
- Avoid using second-person narrative in articles. As noted earlier, this wiki should read like an encyclopedia.
- Wherever possible, use the full name of a character the first time they are mentioned. It is acceptable to abbreviate the title in some cases, including names that are commonly abbreviated in official material.
Page titles
General
CyberAcme's article titles aim to provide basic information about the subject, either in the form of its official name (if known) or a description given by editors if the subject is not identified in official media. If necessary, a description should be brief and informative, and any terms that are not proper nouns should not be capitalized.
In most cases, weapons and vehicles are titled with the item's formal designation or model number followed by its more colloquial, in-game moniker (as opposed to the full technical name, which is conveyed in the introductory section of the article). Capitalization of terms in titles follows our capitalization policy, discussed in an earlier section of this article.
Disambiguating titles
If there are two or more subjects with the same name, it is necessary to disambiguate the article titles from one another. When disambiguating titles with bracketed addendums, in-universe subjects should always be treated as primary. Note that exceptions to this policy can be made if the real-world subject is considerably more notable than its canonical counterpart. If two or more in-universe subjects share the same name, the more notable subject should be treated as primary.
Separate disambiguation pages with the addendum "(disambiguation)" are used when there are more than two articles with the same title, with a link to the disambiguation page placed on top of the "primary" (i.e. non-disambiguated) article with that name.
Definite and indefinite articles
In general, a definite ("the") or indefinite ("a"/"an") article should be included at the beginning of the title of a page only if at least one of the following conditions is met:
- If a word with a definite article has a different meaning with respect to the same word without the article, the word with article can be used as the name of a page about that meaning, and the word without article can be used as the name of a separate page.
- If the definite or indefinite article would be capitalized in running text, then include it at the beginning of the page name. Otherwise, do not.
These conditions are sometimes met if the page name is:
- the title of a work or publication, in-universe or not, or
- the name of a game level, or
- another official or commonly used proper name which invariably includes the definite article.
Title template
The wiki uses Template:Title to alter an article title or portions thereof. The most common application is the addition of italics to media titles or ship names. However, the template is not to be used to make changes to the title itself; e.g. bracketed addenda used for disambiguation should not be hidden, or extra terms (such as "The") shouldn't be added. This is to maintain clarity as to the article's actual title.
Linking and redirects
Redirects are your friend. When linking to pages, it is unnecessary to avoid using redirects if they are available. There are several reasons for this, the most obvious being the immediate benefit of less extra clutter on the page as well as the fact using redirects is not harmful in any way. Additionally, if the title of an article section is changed, it is much less burdensome to change a single redirect page linking to that section than change all links to that section in many articles. Also, if the redirect is at some later point made into its own page, one does not need to change all links directing there because they were piped to the former parent article.
Also note that it is not necessary to use a piped link to convert the first letter of a title to lower case. Both function identically, as the wiki treats the first letter of a link as case-insensitive.
It is also unnecessary to use piped links when only a given part of a term is linked, as long as the rest of the term is not separated from the linked portion (wikilinks automatically convert the rest of the word into a link).
Article size rule
When deciding as to whether an article should be divided, please refer to the following table.
| Readable prose size | What to do |
| > 100 KB | Almost certainly should be divided |
| > 60 KB | Probably should be divided (although the scope of a topic can sometimes justify the added reading time) |
| ≥ 40 KB | May need to be divided (likelihood goes up with size) |
| < 40 KB | Length alone does not justify division |
| < 1 KB | If an article or list has remained this size for over a couple of months, consider combining it with a related page. Alternatively, why not fix it by adding more info? See wikipedia:Stub. |
Editing
Avoid making multiple edits in an article
While CyberAcme encourages editing of articles, an excessive amount of saved edits on a single article may be seen as spam. As such, a maximum of three successive edits in an article is acceptable within a short amount of time; regardless of the editor's intent, exceeding this limit may be seen as an attempt to spam and a staff member will inform you to stop and explain the scenario. If the staff member is ignored it may result in a ban for up to a week to a few months, depending on the extent of the infraction.
A simple way of avoiding this problem is to practice using the Preview button which allows you to review the contributions you made before saving them.
Use the minor edit button
If you are making a minor edit (e.g. fixing a spelling error or tweaking formatting), check the "This is a minor edit" button below the Summary box before saving the page. Again, this will make things easier for the rest of us.
Use the preview button
The preview button is right next to the save edit button, and is there for a reason. It's your own personal spell checker, link checker, whatever-else checker. Use it. Users that purposefully do not preview edits as to inflate their edit count are not well regarded, and you may find yourself in trouble with an administrator.
Always use the summary box
Before you touch that "Save page" button, always fill in the "Summary" box above the Save/Preview buttons before saving, and make sure that you fill it in with something useful describing the edit you made and, if it's not obvious, why. For example, "fixed spelling error" or "added fun fact" or "reverted from troll 127.0.0.1" are all acceptable. Saying "made some changes" or just filling in the name of the page is not helpful, because it's information that we already have.
Making your summaries accurate and useful makes it vastly easier for the rest of us to keep track of recent changes and keeps everybody happy.
Do not sign your edits
All contributions are appreciated, but if every user left their mark on every contribution they made, the wiki would be nothing but signatures. If you have made an edit that you are particularly proud of (such as a transcript or screenshot), the correct place to take credit is on your own user page. If you do not have a user account, we respect your anonymity, but your edits will remain anonymous, too.
Do 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 do not have a user account, just sign it with your name or nickname so everybody can tell who is who when reading long conversations. Even better, create an account anyway and use the signature method described. There really is no reason not to if you are going to stick around.
Using images/files
- Add only canon images, not screenshots from customized/tweaked canon games or mods.
- Avoid uploading pictures you don't have a purpose for, unless they can add to a subject gallery.
Layout
Stubs
If you do not know enough information on a topic, or you know there's more, add a stub to it. To do so, try this:
{{stub}}
People will know the article is a stub by looking at the stub category. Generally the {{stub}} template is put at the top of the page.
Do not link to the current page
In other words, a page should not link to itself. If it is attempted, the link will simply turn into bold text.
Link once
A given section of sufficient size should only contain one link to any other page. Typically this link should be the first instance of the term in the article.
External links
External links are links that point to sites other than the wiki. The links should be in the form of a bullet list. External links typically look like this:
[http://www.bungie.net/filename.html '''The Website''': ''Title of the article'']
Headers/Headings
Never make a header title as links. Instead, use the Main template and add it under the header. Additionally, avoid adding the Ref tag to the header.