Friday Night Funkin Wiki:Style Manual

See also: Project:Rules

The style manual aims to establish a general set of guidelines and parameters for the way articles are written and formatted. Editors are advised to follow these guidelines closely in order to prevent their edits from being reverted and ensure that the wiki remains consistent and organized.

Keep in mind that the style guide merely lists practices that are widely in use. It is not a means to impose extensive policies or even personal preferences.

Not all pages may follow the style guide entirely, as the sheer number of pages can make it easy to have something go overlooked, and some of those pages might not have been touched in a long time. All editors are encouraged to rectify such deviations.

General guidelines

• Proofread the edit before saving it to make sure it fits with the rest of the article's style. Neglecting spelling or grammar, repeating information, writing vaguely, or not following any other of the style guide's guidelines may result in the edit being modified or undone by other editors. (If desiring assistance with grammar or formatting, say so in the edit summary, and other editors can help fix it.)
• Before saving an edit, the changes should briefly be explained in the edit summary field. This helps other editors understand the intentions, avoids conflict over controversial modifications, and facilitates searching for a certain change in the page history.

Language and Grammar

• Friday Night Funkin' was released in American English, and as such, this wiki uses standard American English.
• Use standard, formal English and proper grammar and spelling. Keep contracted forms (such as don't, there's) to a minimum — preferably use the full forms (such as do not, there is) instead — and do not use colloquialisms or slang.
  • In-game terms and dialogue are exempt from this.
• Ensure a neutral, encyclopedic-like tone:

• Write in third person. Do not include first- or second-person perspectives. Do not address the reader as "you." When referring to people who play the game, simply refer to them as "the player" or "players." Describing things in a passive voice is also acceptable.
• Adhere to facts. Do not include opinions or phrase anything on a page in a manner that could possibly inject personal biases and viewpoints into the subject.
• Do not use profanity or vulgar language to describe things in an article. The only exception when such language is permitted is if it is relevant to the page subject. A prime example is cutscene dialogue, which must be transcribed accurately and faithfully to the game. In these circumstances, profanities (and potentially slurs) must be written uncensored.

• For possessive forms of words ending with a pronounced s, including plural nouns, do not add an s after the apostrophe.
• When writing a sentence in parenthesis to add onto an existing sentence, the period is added outside. If a sentence in parentheses stands by itself, add it inside.
• Commas and periods should be placed inside of quotation marks, unless in certain cases where another punctuation is already inside the quotation marks. Colons and semicolons are to be placed outside of quotation marks.
• Dates should be written in the acceptable date formats as described on Wikipedia.

Text formatting guidelines

• The first instance of the page title should be bold.
• Titles of major works are to be italicized. Note that this includes Friday Night Funkin'.
• Titles of minor works are to be enclosed in double quotation marks.
• Titles of in-game tracks, regardless of type or place used (e.g., Bopeebo, Gettin' Freaky), are not italicized or enclosed in double quotes.
• Straight quotation marks and apostrophes (" and ') should be used instead of curly ones (“ and ’).
• Italics and bold markup should not enclose punctuation.

Article formatting

Most articles have a general format that must be followed. This is best seen across pages with similar subject matters, such as characters, songs, or weeks. Look at what similar pages do and follow their basic format instead of wildly deviating from it and breaking the format in the process.

Trivia

Trivia sections are bulleted lists located at the end of the main content of an article containing interesting, little-known facts that cannot be incorporated into an article effectively. Trivia must be true, and speculation must be avoided; opinions, theories, information that cannot be verified, and such must be removed.

References

• If a page has references, the final section of the article (before External Links, if applicable) must be a section titled "References" that includes {{Reflist}}.
• Citation markers are placed after adjacent punctuation such as periods and commas, apart from three exceptions: they should go before dashes, before slashes, and when a citation only applies to material in parentheses, it should go before the closing parenthesis.
• See Template:Cite web/doc for examples on how to format citations.
• In the case of finding questionable content that has not been properly cited, don't delete it. Instead, add a {{Citation needed}} tag. Before adding the tag, it is recommended to try to find a source first.

Update versions

On most occasions, when describing a subject or content in relation to the update it was shipped with:

• Use the week name if the update added a new level (e.g., "Almost every song was recharted in the Week 7 update.").
• Use the update name for other major content updates (e.g., "The Pit Stop 1 update added ranks to the Freeplay and Results screens.").
  • If an update has multiple names (e.g., "Destination 2" or "Playable Pico") or spellings (e.g., "Pit Stop 2" or "Pitstop 2"), use the one listed in the changelog, if available.
• Use the version number for patches, hotfixes and other minor updates (e.g., "The cutscene crashes in Week 6 were fixed with the release of 0.2.7.1.", "0.3.2 fixed the audio being muddy in HTML5.").

Coding guidelines

• The syntax provided by MediaWiki is preferred over HTML, e.g., '''bold''' instead of <b>bold</b> and {| instead of <table>. Nonetheless, in some cases the HTML syntax may be more beneficial for code readability or even necessary to avoid errors, such as in templates.
• Section titles, lists, and indentations should include spaces for readability, i.e.:
  • == Section == instead of ==Section==
  • * bullet point and # enumerated item instead of *bullet point and #enumerated item
  • : indented text instead of :indented text
• Section titles should be immediately followed by the section text or the following subsection title, without an empty line in between.
• Section titles should always be preceded by an empty line, unless this interferes with the rule above or creates an empty paragraph.

Links

There are several rules to follow when adding links to articles.

• The first instance of an entity name on a page should always be linked.
• There should not exist multiple links to the same page in a single article. Exceptions are:
  • when two or more links are linking to a different section of the same page
  • when one of the links is in the infobox/navbox and the other in the actual content
  • when one or more of the links are piped links rendered with different text
  • when duplicate links would be helpful on larger pages that would require a lot of scrolling to find an entity's first mention
• Links must not exist in section headers.
• When possible, do not place links next to each other so that it looks like one link. If this is not possible, consider omitting one of the links or rephrasing the sentence.
• Citations stand alone in their usage, so there is no problem with repeating the same link in many citations within an article, although different articles may handle this differently.

Galleries

• Galleries should only include images related to their page. This includes assets, game screenshots/GIFs, related sketches, and concept art by the game's artists. A guest character's gallery can include images of their original appearances from their home series for comparison to their appearance in Friday Night Funkin'.
• All gallery files require a caption that briefly describes them. Do not leave them blank.
• Dedicated galleries must have their images organized under section headers. Make sure that they are placed somewhere appropriate, such as doodles and sketches under the "Doodles" section or unused character assets under the "Currently Unused" section.

Sprites

Main article: Project:Ripping sprites

Wiki

• Rules
• Style Manual
• To-do List
• Ripping sprites