Helldivers Wiki:Manual Of Style

The Manual of Style (often abbreviated MoS or MOS) is a style guide for all Helldivers Wiki articles and official documents. It establishes our house style, to help editors produce articles with consistent, clear, and precise language, layout, and formatting. The goal is to make the encyclopedia easier and more intuitive to use. Consistency in style and formatting promotes clarity and cohesion; this is especially important within an article.

For default page layouts, see Helldivers_Wiki:Manual_Of_Style/Page_Structures

General Wiki Structure

The following structure is what the wiki is using as its standard, this should assist you in deciding if something should/should not be put into its own page. We will use missions as an example:

Categories

• Each overarching "type" of page should have its own main category
• That main category will contain 0 or more sub-categories, based on how large the main topic is
  • Criteria for sub-categories:
    • Pages should not be part of more than two sub categories at most.
    • A Sub-category should have at least three pages from the main category able to be linked into it.
  • A sub category should only contain pages from its parent category.
  • further levels of sub-categories can be added as long as the criteria listed above is still met for the lowest level of category.

Example

Lets use "missions" pages as an example:

• Missions should have its own category Category:Missions
• Missions can be either required or optional, we should therefore create two sub-categories for them
  • Category:Main Objectives for required missions
  • Category:Side Objectives for side objectives
• Category:Main Objectives can either be Terminid Exclusive, Automaton Exclusive, or Both.
  • There are, however, not many pages that would fit into only one of these sub-categories, so for the time being we will stop categorization here.

Category Overview Pages

This wiki does not use category pages in any form besides using them to link to parent categories. Instead we use separate overview pages for each category.

• Each #Category should have at most one overview page linked to it.
• The overview page should have the same name as the category it represents.
• The overview page should contain the text [[Category:CATEGORYNAME|!]] at the bottom to make sure it is shown as the first result in the category it represents.
• The overview page should contain general information that pertains to the category as a whole.
  • The "Missions" category would talk about facts that are true to any main mission or side objective.
• Content from the overview page should be more general than any of the pages within the category.
• Content within the overview page should never be exactly copied from the pages within the category.
• Each page within the category should be linked to from the overview page.
  • The standard method of creating these links are by creating a header for each sub-category
  • Within each sub-category header, a table should be placed listing high-level information about the pages within the sub-category
    • One of these pieces of information should be the title of the page, created as a link.
      • Links should be the exact page name
    • One of these pieces of information should be an image related to the page.
    • Additional information should apply to all rows of the table
    • Additional information should be relevant to the use case of the page: I am a user looking at the high-level differences between all of these items at a high level.
      • Example: On the Weapons overview page, a user looking at that page does not care about every statistic for every gun. The table should be simplified to only a few key statistics

Content Pages

When thinking about if a page needs to be split into multiple pages, consider the following:

• Pages should be broken down into their smallest pieces. If an item/feature can have its own description and at least one image, it probably needs its own page.
• A user should not have to scroll more than one full page length (on PC) to see the entirety of one page.
  • If the page is long, splitting it should be considered.
  • Some pages (such as Galactic War) will not be able to avoid this.
  • #Category Overview pages do not apply to this rule, but should be shortened where possible.
• A page should have at minimum an overview description of the item/feature, and an image.
• The page should be set up in a way that it is expandable for the super user
  • If a user wants to dig in super deep to the smallest piece of the game and document specifics about it, there should be a page they can expand.
• If a larger page contains information about a smaller page, the larger page should contain general information, while the smaller page contains the specifics.
  • For the Automaton Outpost page, it originally went into details on how specifically you can destroy Automaton Fabricators.
    • This is an example of a perfect case where a new page can be used.
      • The Automaton Outpost page should list general information about the outposts, what they contain, and how to destroy them.
      • The Automaton Fabricator page should list specific in-depth strategies on how to destroy them, as well as any lore/images surrounding them (what they spawn, how they spawn, etc.)

Article Titles, Sections, and Headings

Article Titles

An article title is a convenient label for the article, which distinguishes it from other articles.

The following points are critical to formatting article titles:

• Article titles should never contain special characters. These are characters such as parentheses, brackets, or colons.
• Use "Title Case": The initial letter of each word in a title is capitalized
  • Example: Targeting Software Upgrade, not Targeting software upgrade.
• Item pages should be named the same as their in game name, with spelling corrected and capitalization changed to "Title Case".

Article Sections

• Headings can link to other articles ONLY if the entire heading is made a link. Partial links in headings are not allowed.
• Citations should not be placed within or on the same line as section and subsection headings.
• Headings should not contain images, including flag icons.

Category Titles

• Category titles must be in the plural form: Category:Stratagems not Category:Stratagem

Spelling

American spelling should be used on all encyclopedia articles on Helldivers Wiki, on any template transcribed on articles, on transcripts, and on all official projects and blog posts. There are the following exceptions:

• Regional variations in spelling may be used in all other contexts on Helldivers Wiki, such as comments, talk pages, user pages, blog posts, fanon and fan fiction.
• If quoting a source, never alter any part of the quotation, even if it does not use American spelling.

Punctuation

Apostrophes

Consistent use of the straight (or typewriter) apostrophe ( '' ) is recommended, as opposed to the curly (or typographic) apostrophe ( ’' ).

Commas

Modern practice is against excessive use of commas; there are usually ways to simplify a sentence so that fewer are needed.

Colons

A colon ( : )informs the reader that what comes after it demonstrates, explains, or modifies what has come before, or is a list of items that has just been introduced. The items in such a list may be separated by commas; or, if they are more complex and perhaps themselves contain commas, the items should be separated by semicolons.

• In most cases a colon works best with a complete grammatical sentence before it. There are exceptions, such as when the colon introduces items set off in new lines like the very next colon here.
• The word following a colon is capitalized, if that word effectively begins a new grammatical sentence, and especially if the colon serves to introduce more than one sentence
• No sentence should contain more than one colon. There should never be a hyphen or a dash immediately following a colon. Only a single space follows a colon.

Semicolons

A semicolon ( ; ) is sometimes an alternative to a period, enabling related material to be kept in the same sentence; it marks a more decisive division in a sentence than a comma. If the semicolon separates clauses, normally each clause must be independent (meaning that it could stand on its own as a sentence); often, only a comma or only a semicolon will be correct in a given sentence.

• A semicolon does not force a capital letter in the word that follows it.

• A sentence may contain several semicolons, especially when the clauses are parallel; multiple unrelated semicolons are often signs that the sentence should be divided into shorter sentences, or otherwise refashioned.

Terminal punctuation

• Clusters of question marks, exclamation marks, or a combination of them (such as the interrobang), are highly informal and inappropriate in articles.
• Use the exclamation mark with restraint. It is an expression of surprise or emotion that is generally unsuitable for an encyclopedia.

Spacing

• Never place a space before commas, semicolons, colons, or terminal punctuation.
• Always place a space after the punctuation marks just mentioned, unless it is the end of a paragraph, dot point, list element or the article.
• Use one space after terminal punctuation. The use of double spaces is pointless as MediaWiki automatically condenses any number of spaces to just one when rendering the page.

Dates and time

• Avoid expressing time relative to what is considered "current", as new information can easily outdate it e.g. This item was removed in Patch 1.000.300, not This item was removed last January.
• Use of the term "current" should be avoided. What is current today may not be tomorrow; situations change over time. Instead, use date and time-specific text.
• Dates listed on pages should follow the ISO Standard YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm UTC

Numbers

• In general, write whole numbers one through nine as words when used within a sentence, write other numbers that take two words or fewer to say as either numerals or words, and write all other numbers as numerals: 1/5 or one fifth, 84 or eighty-four, 200 or two hundred, but 3.75, 544, 21 million). This applies to both ordinal and cardinal numbers.
• Use a comma to delimit numbers with four or more digits to the left of the decimal point: 12,345 and 1,000.

Grammar

• For the possessive of singular nouns ending with just one s, add just an apostrophe.
• For a normal plural noun, ending with a pronounced s, form the possessive by adding just an apostrophe e.g. "his sons' wives".

Formality and neutrality

• Uncontracted forms such as do not or it is are the default in encyclopedic style, however, don't and it's are also allowed.
• On encyclopedia articles, avoid such phrases as remember that and note that, which address readers directly in a less-than-encyclopedic tone. Similarly, phrases such as of course, naturally, obviously, clearly, and actually make presumptions about readers' knowledge, and call into question the reason for including the information in the first place. Do not tell readers that something is ironic, surprising, unexpected, amusing, coincidental, unfortunate, etc. This supplies a point of view. Simply state the sourced facts and allow readers to draw their own conclusions.

Images

General

The following points are critical to formatting files:

• Use "Title Case": The initial letter of each word in a title is capitalized
• Use .png format whenever possible to keep file types as consistent as possible
• Images with variants should never contain the number "1" for the first variant. If variants occur for an image/item, the variant counter should be left off of the first one and should start at 2 for all other variants.
  • For example, If there was a second variant of the "SA-25 Steel Trooper Helmet" the first variant would have the filename "SA-25 Steel Trooper Helmet Icon.png", and the second one would have the filename "SA-25 Steel Trooper Helmet Icon 2.png"
• Spaces and underscores count as the same thing on the wiki. Feel free to use either in your file names.

Image Names

Item Icons

• "ItemName_ItemType_Icon_VariantNumber.png"
  • Potential Item Types:
    • Helmet
    • Armor
    • Grenade
    • Weapon
    • Booster
    • Stratagem
  • Reminder: do not include a "1" for the first variant. Only include "VariantNumber" on the second variant and higher
    • "SA-25_Steel_Trooper_Helmet_Icon.png" SA-25 Steel Trooper Helmet (Variant 1)
    • "SA-25_Steel_Trooper_Helmet_Icon_2.png" SA-25 Steel Trooper Helmet (Variant 2)

Planet On-Ground Screenshots

• "PlanetName_Landscape_Ground_Variation.png"
  • The default variant should be taken during mid-day, with no active planetary effects
  • Variants should be items such as time of day and planetary effects that are active
    • The time of day should be added after the active planetary effect when applicable
  • Examples for Heeth:
    • "Heeth Landscape Ground.png" = Default, No effects, Daytime
    • "Heeth Landscape Ground Sunrise.png" = No effects, Sunrise
    • "Heeth Landscape Ground Sunset.png" = No effects, Sunset
    • "Heeth Landscape Ground Night.png" = No effects, Nighttime
    • "Heeth Landscape Ground Blizzards.png" = Blizzards, Daytime
    • "Heeth Landscape Ground Blizzards Sunrise.png" = Blizzards, Sunrise
    • "Heeth Landscape Ground Blizzards Sunset.png" = Blizzards, Sunset
    • "Heeth Landscape Ground Blizzards Night.png" = Blizzards, Nighttime

Item Icons

• Item icons should be taken from the "Armory" selection screen with the piece of equipment selected, but not equipped (see example image)
• The file name should be of the format "Item_Name_ItemType_Icon_VariantNumber.png".
  • For example, the attached image has a file name of "SA-25_Steel_Trooper_Helmet_Icon.png" (You can replace the underscores with spaces if you would like, they count as the same thing on the wiki)

Videos

Similar rules as for image formatting:

• Use "Title Case": The initial letter of each word in a title is capitalized.
• Use .mp4 format whenever possible to keep file types as consistent as possible.
• There is a hard 10MB file size limit for uploading to the wiki! Use your best judgment, and when necessary compression software (e.g. Handbrake), to keep within this limit or your files will become un-uploadable!
• Aim for a minimum quality of 720p. 30fps is preferred and so is as high a bitrate as possible. Whenever in doubt, inspect with your eyes: If it looks bad on your local drive, it won't look any better on the wiki!
• Please give useful names & descriptions to files you upload for later reference. "Machine Gun Preview Video" is more helpful to your fellow editors than "MG_PV".
• Whenever uploading material made by someone who is not you, please append the appropriate license, e.g. the "Arrowhead Studios" license for material taken from the game itself. You can find a list of all license templates at Template:License, use it to find the appropriate license (if any) and apply it to files you upload.
• Feel free to use either spaces or underscores in your file names. These count as the same thing on the wiki.

Links

To add a link in a text, surround the word with brackets (i.e. [[word]]).

• Make links only where they are relevant and helpful in the context: Hyperlinks are distracting and may slow the reader down.
  • In general, it is good practice to only link to a specific page the first time it is referenced in an article.
  • The exception to the "Only Once" rule is if a page is long enough where the reader cannot easily see the original link. In these cases it makes sense to add additional links to make sure the reader can always easily go to that page.
• Favor Wiki.gg wiki links. External links to other Wiki.gg wikis are allowed and encouraged over all other external links as long as they are relevant to the article. Other additional external links can be listed under an external links section at the end, pointing to further information outside Helldivers Wiki as opposed to citing sources.
• Avoid using Wikipedia links. Wiki.gg wikis and other different external sites should be favored over Wikipedia links.
• Use direct links rather than linking via a redirect page.
• When linking to a normally not capitalized word in the body of a text, it suffices to create a lower-cased link
• When linking to an article for plural use, it suffices to create the plural form of the linked word by creating a pipe-link (e.g. [[Bottles|Bottle]], not[[Bottle]]s).

Miscellaneous

Source mode editing markup

• Place spaces on either side of the text in a heading e.g. == Heading ==.
• Place a blank line before a line containing a heading, except when a sub-heading immediately follows a heading, where there should be no blank line between the heading and the sub-heading.
• Do not place a blank line between a heading and the text or files below it.
• File link parameters should appear in this order: [[File:Filename.png|thumb|right|200px|Description.]]
• Place blank lines before and after a file, separating it from body text.
• Place a space after the asterisk and hash symbols in unordered and ordered lists respectively, so that each new list item is easier to find e.g. * Item.

To promote consistency and ease of editing, the following items, if appropriate, should appear in this order before the lead section of an article.

1. Information about other uses, similar topics and links to disambiguation pages.
2. Notices detailing article quality and areas of improvement.
3. Infobox Template, if a relevant one exists, split apart with a line for each template parameter. The closing curly bracket for the infobox template should be on a new line. The lead section should begin on a new line after this curly bracket.

Separate each of the items listed above with a blank line.

See Also

Helldivers Wiki:Manual Of Style/Templates - For template and module code on the site.