This article is being actively supported by the SNAZpedia Improvement Project. Overseers can become part of the SNAZpedia Improvement Project by joining our Discord server and checking the Overseers' Office forums.
Welcome to the SNAZpedia! We use a universally-applied format here to make every article human-readable, and the standardization is defined here by our style guide. While not every situation can be covered by this article alone, this just gives authors a general idea how to format their pages properly.
Notes about templates
Our servers may be slow to update content at times, and sometimes, it may be a browser cache issue. Templates, scripts, and CSS may not update across all pages at the same time. When in doubt, always reset your browser's cache first.
On desktop, you can do the following:
- Firefox / Safari: Hold Shift while clicking Reload, or press either Ctrl-F5 or Ctrl-R (⌘-R on a Mac)
- Google Chrome: Press Ctrl-Shift-R (⌘-Shift-R on a Mac)
- Internet Explorer / Edge: Hold Ctrl while clicking Refresh, or press Ctrl-F5
- Opera / Opera GX, Vivaldi: Press Ctrl-F5.
On mobile devices, instructions are different due to the lack of keybinds.
- Safari on iOS (Official Apple Support website)
- Google Chrome on Android and iOS (Official Google Support website)
If templates or CSS is still not updating, give the server about 1 hour to correct itself, as the server also has its own cache.
Table of Contents
The Table of Contents is generated when the article contains a certain number of headings and sub-headings.
Sometimes, pages may adopt the Table of Contents feature by mistake. This may throw content back over to the left or right side of the screen, when you meant to have it cover the whole screen. Such cases where you may not want a Table of Contents may include:
- Landing pages, like the home page
- Pages meant to have large tables for listing multiple objects in a sub-category (See Major Civilizations for an example)
To fix this, go into the source editor and insert __NOTOC__ on the first line, making sure to separate it from the page's contents.
Outside of these rare few cases, removal of the Table of Contents (if not automatically generated) is frowned down upon, especially with long articles. Removal of the Table of Contents can reduce accessibility and may render readers getting lost on your article.
Page titles
tl;dr: Clarify what the page is about in parentheses if the subject shares words or works.Some subjects may contain the same name, and clarification may be needed. Ever since September 22, 2022, disambiguation pages were added, but clarification parentheses have always existed. For example, articles for Wyrms of Nyrus's wyrms end with (Wyrms of Nyrus), such as Prober (Wyrms of Nyrus) or Hive Creep (Wyrms of Nyrus), while normal canon articles may not include the specification, as as Nyral Wyrms. Doing this makes it easy to create disambiguation pages such as Wyrms (Disambiguation).
For article titles, capitalization rules may depend on the subject. By default, capitalize the first letter of any beginning word. If items and technologies are being discussed, only capitalize the first letter of the first word. Corporate, government, and tech brand names may follow different rules outside of the norm.
NEVER USE ABBREVIATIONS IN PAGE TITLES, even in parentheses. Leave abbreviations in the body of the page, not title. Only a few pages break this rule, likely for lore reasons. (See SNAZ OS)
Maintenance templates
Always put maintenance notices up at the top of pages, some of these are important for readers, not just editors.
| Template | Use |
|---|---|
| {{Long}} | The article in question is very long and deserves a summarization page, or it may already have a summarization page.. |
| {{Stub}} | The article is short, and there could be more to add to the page. |
| {{Review}} | The article in question needs additional review. |
| {{Improvement}} | The article is under construction by the SNAZpedia Improvement Project. This is reserved specifically for the SIP team and warns readers that major cosmetic and accessibility features on a page are to be expected. |
| {{Under Construction}} | The article is currently experiencing a high volume of edits from the editor(s) working on it. This lets other editors know to avoid editing the page for the time being. |
Summarization
Long articles aren't necessarily bad, especially if users are warned on the very beginning of the page that the article is lengthy. In fact, we encourage writers to write long articles! Even if it is not for everyone, summarization/simplification pages are provided for those who want a quick read.
If the Long template is used, then the summarization page that gets created must not take longer than 5 minutes to read.
If this is hard to determine, use ReadTime at 1 speed and paste your text into the box. If it takes more than 3.5 minutes (without breaks), then some details should be omitted.
Header layouts
The SNAZpedia uses many standard layouts for articles. By default, it should look something like this:
- Top of article
- Maintenance notices/messages
- Infoboxes or image
- Body of article
- Introduction (not labeled)
- Content
- Related/Involved media
- Trivia
- Gallery
- Notes
- References
- Citations
- Bottom of article
- Categories
Section header formatting
In the case of section headers, capitalize the first letter, leave the rest in lowercase. However, some section names may break this rule (such as proper nouns like names of locations).
Additional header rules apply:
- Do not include numbers in header names (page names excluded in some cases)
- Redundancy is not necessary. (E.g. "Nyral Wyrm Biology" when you could just use "Biology")
- Do not put images in headers
- Do not make headers link to other articles (Article headers are meant to work with a Table of Contents (ToC) already, this may break said features.)
- Do not phrase the header as a question
- Try to keep headers under 4 words in length (exceptions apply)
- Do not put citations or footnotes in headers
- Avoid duplicate headers (This confuses the ToC feature)
- Instead, use sub-headers in the main header you are looking at.
Introduction sections
Introduction sections are the first section of an article, which doesn't include any header at all.
- Must at MOST be 300 characters (excluding quotes)
- Maximum of 4 quotes relating to the subject
- Mention the subject as early as possible
- If the article is related to a piece of media, mention and link the main page of the media in question within the same sentence.
- This is the page's summary, it should not contain trivia or complex details.
- When the name of the subject appears for the first time in the article, bold it.
Links
Links are a tricky business to work with, particularly when it comes to figuring out where to place them. Thankfully, we have included the guide for how to work with links within the Style Guide:
Internal links
- Only the first mention of a subject needs to be linked.
- Exceptions to this would be if the article is extremely long (Has the Long maintenance template), in which after every 500 words, or every 2-3 sections, make the next mention within the first usage in the section link to the respective article.
- Do not create partial links like
[[Style Guide]]'s, instead, do the following:[[Style Guide|Style Guide's]] - The Visual Editor and Source Editor both have GUIs for making links, this is the recommended way of making links.
- In order to link to a category, you most likely will need to use the
:Category:prefix, notCategory:. (Source editor)
External links
- Take care in linking external links in the first place, make sure you have a reason to do so:
- Linking to locations where media is located to allow for easier user accessibility
- Link to locations or content that has relevancy to the article
- Make sure to make external links use HTTPS, not HTTP.
- Avoid linking directly to any media files. If possible, try to link to the HTML the media appears on.
- Linking to
.zipand.movfiles and web domains is strictly forbidden by the SNAZpedia TOS.
References
References are used on the SNAZpedia to direct readers to further reading on a subject that is explained far beyond this wiki. A reference may also be cited in the article. A reference should be the next thing a reader should look into on a subject, just above citations.
Citations
Citing outside websites is highly recommended, especially if you want to mix real-world science into your articles. Other times, you may want to cite a fan work, media source, or other related article on the SNAZpedia. Usually, Citation Machine's and EasyBib's formatting in their citation generators will carry over into wikitext just fine when pasted into articles.
To cite an article or an outside source, the Visual Editor's toolbar (on the top of the screen) has a Cite dropdown button on it. Place your cursor after the text you wish to cite, click that position, click the Cite button, and paste an individual citation into the text box to put it in the article. If you have a citation in the article, create a Heading (Desktop shortcut: Ctrl+2) titled "Citations", and within the Insert dropdown menu, press "more" and select the references list.
Generally, you should use the APA citation format for scientific articles, and MLA formatting for media articles. It's up to writers to determine what the most appropriate formatting is for the article. In many cases, though, you will find MLA in use.
Fonts
Colored fonts outside of templates and links are not allowed. This breaks user accessibility and can make it difficult for readers with vision impairments to access content on the site.
- Red font color is reserved for pages that do not yet exist.
- Blue font color is reserved for pages that do exist.