Style Guide

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This page details all a formatting editor needs to know about writing & formatting style established on this wiki. The base we build off of is Associated Press Style (AP) and Wikipedia Manual of Style. When in doubt, feel free to ask whatever questions you might have in the Discussion page corresponsing to this one, or refer to Wikipedia's Manual of Style.

Article titles, sections, and headings

Article titles

• Capitalize the initial letter (except in rare cases, such as "eBay"), but otherwise follow title case ("Funding of UNESCO Projects"). Note that this specific rule is different from that of Wikipedia's.
• Do not use articles (a, an, or the) as the first word ("Economy of the Second Empire", not "The economy of the Second Empire"), unless it is an inseparable part of a name ("The Hague") or title of a work ("A Clockwork Orange", "The Simpsons").
• Normally use nouns or noun phrases: "Early life", not "In early life".
• The final character should not be punctuation unless it is an inseparable part of a name ("Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!", "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") or an abbreviation ("Inverness City F.C."), or when a closing round bracket or quotation mark is required ("John Palmer (1814 schooner)").
• Whenever quotation marks or apostrophes appear, add a redirect for the same title using the other.
• Whenever naming articles for locations, keep them as accurate to their naming in the Waystones grid as possible for the sake of accuracy and accessibility. For example: "Phil & Missa" and not "Phil & Missa's House".

Section organization

• An article's content should begin with an introductory lead section—a concise summary of the article—which is never divided into sections. The remainder of the article is typically divided into sections.
• Infoboxes, images, and related content in the lead section must be right-aligned.
• If an article has section headings, a navigable table of contents will appear automatically, just after the lead.
• The headings for characters, eggs, NPCs & others should be ordered as follows:
  • Physical Description
    • Skins
  • Personality
  • Possessions
    • Items
    • Pets
  • History
  • Relationships
  • Quotes
  • Trivia
  • Gallery

Information organization within "Personality" section

The rough template for organizing information for characters' personality is as follows (at least a paragraph per bullet point):

• Most notable character traits (what do you immediately think about when you think about a given character?).
• Character's behaviour in group settings.
• Relationship with their children (if applicable).
• Extra traits (being strategic, for example, goes here).
• Favorite things & preferences.

You may also add extra sections (Mental Health, for example) if you feel like it's suitable. Don't add a section if it would only contain a paragraph worth of information.

For an example of a well-written "Personality" section please check Philza's, Antoine Daniel's and Aypierre's write-ups. For an example of a "Mental Health" section, see Pac's page.

Information organization within "History" section

The "History" section should contain a brief recap of character's appearances and overarching actions and history on the server. Do not put stream recaps in here; use Template:HistoryMore instead. Don't forget to include a "Pre-Server Backstory" section if applicable.

For an example of a well-written "History" section, please check Mike's write-up.

Gallery sections organization

The images within the Gallery subpage should be separated into different galleries and ordered as follows:

• Promotional Material
• Screenshots
  • Player Heads (for the eggs)
  • Extra Materials
• Art
  • In-Game Art
    • Created by the character
    • Created by other people and depicting the character.
  • Official Art (if applicable)
  • Museum Exhibits Featuring [the character]
  • Thumbnail Art (if applicable)
    • Other people's thumbnails depicting the character

The galleries should follow the Image guidelines guide.

Text Formatting

• QSMP Miraheze Wiki uses American English spellings and vocabulary. Due to the number of editors and the diversity of their backgrounds, we can't always ensure that this is 100% consistent, but when in doubt, please choose the wording that would be appropriate in American English.

Names

• Eggs' collective name should not be capitalized. ("BadBoyHalo often looks after the eggs", not "BadBoyHalo often looks after the Eggs".)
• The eggs may be called sons, daughter or children, but not kids.
• The spelling of the characters' names should be the same as their username, which is not always the same as their IGN. ("Etoiles" and not "Étoiles".)
  • Ramón is an exception to this rule, as even though his name does not have an accent in-game, it's spelt with it in Eggstatistics and the accented version provides a more accurate pronunciation.
• A shortened version of a name is acceptable, but the mention should have a link to the character's page regardless. ("Dan then met up with Maxo.")

Non-Latin Names

• In the title, write the original name with the romanization in parentheses. For exampleː 중력 (Jungryeok)
• In the lead, write the first name mention in the following formatː "중력, romanized as 'Jungryeok',"
• Afterwards, you are to use the name's romanization. For exampleː Jungryeok is outgoing and cheeky.

Titles

• Capitalize formal titles before a name. ("Acting President Forever.")
• Do not capitalize titles that follow the name. ("Forever, acting president, said that he was happy.")
• In general, formal titles are capitalized only when used directly before an individual's name. ("President Forever.")
• Don't spell out "doctor" when it's used in front of a name. Keep the abbreviation, even in a quotation. ("Maxo then said, "Dr. Roier should be fired" and blew a raspberry.")

Abbreviations

• Do not create your own acronyms. However, you may utilize those that are already in common use (USA, LSD).
• For an acronym's first reference, spell out the full name and add the acronym directly after it in parentheses. ("Foolish declared himself King of Capybaras (KOC).")

Dates

• Dates are to be written out in full. ("January 6, 2023", not "Jan 6 2023".)
• Do not skip the year!
• Only use numerals when writing dates. ("January 6", not "Jan 6th".)

Time

• Use figures except for noon and midnight. ("10 a.m.", not "10:00 a.m.".)
• Use 12-hour system. ("6 pm", not "18:00".)
• Use a colon to separate hours from minutes. ("2:30 p.m.")
• Avoid redundancies. ("9 a.m." or "nine in the morning" but not "9 a.m. this morning".)

Numbers and statistics

• The coordinates are to be formatted as "Xː 0 Zː 0 Yː 0"
• General rule of thumb is that you spell out any number less than 10 in words (two, seven) and use numerals for 10 and greater (10, 42).
• In numbers greater than 1,000, use commas to separate groups of three digits except in page numbers, binary code, serial numbers, temperatures, acoustic frequencies, and degrees of freedom.
• Do not use th or rd at the end of numerals (9^th, 23^rd).
• Two decimal places always.
• More guidance

Capitalization

• Avoid randomly capitalizing words.

Punctuation

• Commas and periods generally go inside quotation marks. ("That's right," Phil said, "I'm already married.")
• The ellipsis is a series of three dots (...). It should only be used to indicate that a substantial amount of information has been omitted from a long quotation of material.
• Quotation marks are used most often for direct speech. They are not used around the names of buildings, slang, or for emphasis.
• Titles of movies, books and TV shows do not go in quotation marks; we mark them with italics instead. ("Foolish then asked Leo if she had seen Attack on Titan, to which he received a positive response.") Note that this rule is different from the one used in AP Style.
• Names of magazines and newspapers are also to be written with italics.
  • (Note: if “the” is part of the proper name, it must be capitalized: like The Post-Standard and The Washington Post and The New York Times. If magazine is not part of the proper name, do not capitalize. This means you must check to find out the proper name.)
• Names of schools or other buildings do not use quotation marks. ("They went to Fit's Fitness for yoga class", not "They went to "Fit's Fitness" for yoga class")

Em Dashes (—), En Dashes (–) , and Hyphens (-)

• Main article to be used as reference: "How to Use Em Dashes (—), En Dashes (–) , and Hyphens (-)" from Merriam-Webster.
• The main thing to know is that you do not need to add spaces before and after em dashes. ("...he tends to act much like his father Philza—he gets easily distracted and often runs off to do his own thing" and not "...he tends to act much like his father Philza — he gets easily distracted and often runs off to do his own thing")
  • I also hate it, yes.
  • For quotes, spaces are acceptable.

Quotes Formatting

When inserting a quote in a language that is not an article's main language, provide a translation in parenthesis below the quote, like so:

• "Aquí estaremos siempre nosotros. Incluso cuando dejemos ser píxeles, seguiremos siendo una historia que fue contada."

("We will always be here. Even when we stop being pixels, we will continue to be a story that was told.") — Missa during a nighttime fishing trip with Chayanne

When inserting a different-language quote from an egg, follow the same formatting:

• “quien tenga miedo a morir que no nazca”

("whoever is afraid to die, don't be born") — Chayanne to Phil

If when copying an egg's quote you wish to showcase the line breaks, use the "/" symbol. Double it for sign changes.

“only what the federation wants me to know / thats what u do right?” — Ramón telling Cucurucho what he knows about the Federation

At the end of a quote, insert a citation link formatted to match the small text, like so:

"I see a lot of [Technoblade] in you, actually... I reckon one day you'll take over the world. I'll be right there watchin'." — Phil to Chayanne on their way back from another adventure^[62]

If you want to omit a part of the quote, use three unspaced dots (...); do not use the precomposed ellipsis character (…) or three dots separated by spaces (. . .).

Infoboxes and relationship tables formatting

• In infoboxes, use "former"/"current" differentiation instead of "past"/"present".
• The words in parenthesis in infoboxes should not be capitalized (write "Kristin (wife)" instead of "Kristin (Wife)", for example).
• Do not extrapolate relationships that haven't been explicitly stated by the character that the page is about. For example: Slimecicle has seven unnamed siblings, but even though he and Mike have said they're brothers, Slimecicle's unnamed siblings do not belong on Mike's page.
  • This is done to avoid cluttering the page with relationships that have not been acknowledge by the characters' creators, and to not overcomplicate the already complicated family trees.
• For the bolded word in character relationships descriptions, use the word that is used by character or the most neutral word that describes said relationship. For example: Chayanne's fathers, Philza and Missa, may be described as "Dad" and "Papa" respectively, as these are the words that he chooses to refer to them with; for Arin's relationship with Maxo and Foolish, however, "Father" would be more suitable.
• For children, use "daughter"/"son"/"child" depending on the child's gender. Differentiation between adopted and "non-"adopted children is acceptable even if the "non-"adopted children are not biological to the parent. For example, it's acceptable to call Dapper the child of BadBoyHalo without the word "adopted", but it should be included when describing his relationship with Pomme. The general rule of thumb is to consider the nature of the relationship, whether it included the parent "raising" the child from the moment they were found, and whether "adopting" the child was a significant moment for the characters involved (see Lullah and Philza as another example of such a relationship).

Citations, references, notes

References go after a period/comma, not before, and are usually stacked at the end of a sentence to increase readability. Compare this (incorrect)

Niki is a caring and gentle—albeit rather socially awkward—individual. Apologetic, self-concious and modest, she enjoys others' company nonetheless, and prefers being close to people rather than alone.

to this (correct):

Niki is a caring and gentle—albeit rather socially awkward—individual. Apologetic, self-concious and modest, she enjoys others' company nonetheless, and prefers being close to people rather than alone.

If you feel like the amount of citations makes it hard to read, feel free to delete those that provide information already available through the other citations. Note that in the example above, deleting any of the citations would be inappropriate, as they all refer to different aspects of Niki's personality and are not mutually replacable.