Timescape Wiki:Manual of Style
In general, the Wikipedia style guide is a good set of guidelines for general issues not covered in this document.
Make sure to end every sentence with an appropriate punctuation mark. Only use a single space between sentences.
The serial comma, sometimes called the Oxford comma, is preferred.
Article titles and headings
Article titles should be written in sentence case, capitalizing the first letter but no others unless they are part of a proper noun. An article's title should be the name by which the subject is currently and most commonly known. Section headings should also be written in sentence case.
Do not use articles (a, an, or the) as the first word (Economy of the Caelian Empire, not The economy of the Caelian Empire), unless it is an inseparable part of a name (The Hague) or title of a work (A Clockwork Orange, The Simpsons).
Other Things
- The term ancestry is always preferred to race.
- The names of ancestries and sub-ancestries (e.g. human, elf, githyanki) are not proper nouns.
- Classes are not proper nouns, but subclasses are, so Slim is a Defender tactician. (not sure if this is true with Draw Steel)
- Nationalities and languages are capitalized, so an individual might be a Riojan polder Defender tactician who speaks Halfling.
- Generic names for magic items (e.g. belt of hill giant strength) are not capitalized except for proper nouns within them (e.g. Heward's handy haversack). Individual named magic items (e.g. Wound) are capitalized.
Past Tense Policy
The Past-Tense Policy, also known as the remove wiki from the timeline policy, addresses the use of tense, particularly past tense, or narrative tense, in in-universe articles on the Timescape Wiki.
Reasoning
The Timescape setting has always been, and still is, an evolving creation. The setting is still expanding and with it events in the Timescape move on.
As such, keeping articles written and up to date, relative to a changing "present day" would be both time-consuming and mostly irrelevant. For example, a town like Bedegar may be thriving in one year, then destroyed, then rebuilt, and so on, so changing from present tense to past tense and back to present tense would be a fool's errand. A character may be alive in one sourcebook, written in the present tense, but then slain in a future adventure! Readers may find the present-tense article, knowing of these events, confusing. A long-lived character like an elf or lich can live for many centuries, but an article written in the present tense implies they are alive and well in this hypothetical present, when they could have died a century before. In sourcebooks, some events are said to have occurred 20 years ago or a century before, but this becomes increasingly inaccurate as a timeline moves forward. Many characters, places, and situations are introduced and never mentioned again, so their "present" status will never be known.
The use of past tense neatly avoids all these issues by locking events in stone as soon as they occur. Therefore, to maintain a consistent writing style, and to eliminate chronological errors, the Timescape Wiki adopted this past-tense policy. Instead, the time to which information pertains will be expressed by absolute dates in the article when possible, whether a year, a decade, or a century. Many events do not have a fixed or known date. In these cases, the era or closest approximation will be used.
This policy does not mean everything is dead and gone. Instead, use of the past tense is a form of narrative tense used for storytelling purposes.
Policy
When writing in-universe articles, the people, places, creatures, items, magic, events, etc., referred to should always be written in the past tense, whether the information is taken from a newly published and up-to-date product or not.
Exceptions
In an in-universe article, when discussing what is known or not known to the editor, readers, or fans, present tense may be used only when pertaining to real-world knowledge. For example, "It is not known if he survived" uses present tense in the first part and past tense in the second part.
Templates
Timeline
You can use {{timescale}} to indicate that a more accurate date or time is required. As an example:
- [[Omund] is the King of Vasloria.[as of when?]
This would be better written as:
- Omund was the King of Vasloria between Heroes 100 and Heroes 200.
Similarly:
- The village was destroyed a century ago.[as of when?]
This can be clarified to:
- The village was destroyed around the 10s Chaos.