UFOpaedia style guide

(Work in progress)

This page attempts to be a guide where various common writing style guidelines that have been agreed on are chronicled for the reference for all the contributors to this wiki.

While many of the legacy articles on this wiki will be in breach of many of these guidelines, it is hoped that as they they will all be slowly brought into line as they are found.

Personal Pronouns

Chatty writing with personal pronouns like "I" should be strictly limited to the talk pages. Remember that a good chunk of the main articles found on this wiki do not always have one author but many.

Prosy writing and humour

Prosy writing and humour is not encourage but necessarily discouraged. The wiki need not have to read like a dull text book, so if either can be incorporated into the descriptions without harming the facts that you are trying to present but instead enhance it, then put it in.

However, there is always the danger that authors may ending up writing fan fiction that does not agree with the games' official continuity.

Neutral Point of View

Where possible, articles should be written with a Neutral Point of View writing style. That is stay, present the core of the information in each article in a factual matter, without any bias for or against the subject being written about. Explain both the positive as well as negative aspects of the subject matter at hand, and let the reader decide how to interpret this information.

There are also various means of comparing the various game elements against each other, but the main information that the articles are trying to present needs to be free of our personal opinions, no matter how valid they may be.

This is a very recent rule that has been implemented, so you will still find a lot of opinionated prose amongst the articles that will need to be revised as they are noticed.

English Spelling Conflicts

With English, because spelling conventions are predominantly divided into "English" English and "American" English, not counting the many other dialects and mutations of the language (Singlish, for example), you may find some will favour or favor one spelling scheme over another. Armour vs. Armor for example.

In general, because this is an international community, either is perfectly acceptable in the body of articles, so do not get into editing wars about superfluous or missing U's.

Major title headings or game terms however should stick to the spelling as they are found in their respective games. X-COM Enemy Unknown/UFO Defense for example uses Armour, whereas X-COM Terror From The Deep uses Armor.