Ultima Codex:Style guide

The following is a list of styles that have become tradition here at the Codex, or have been arrived at by consensus. Unfortunately, this page tends to ask more questions than it answers. Feel free to add anything new to the discussions to which this page links. Do not discuss anything in this article. This article is only for established styles or due acknowledgement of controversies of style.

How to use this article
With patience, is the easy answer. Many issues have been addressed, but not settled. You might be aware of some issues that have not even been addressed. In both these cases, feel free to engage in the forum or on this article's talk page.

What do I do if it doesn't answer my question?
If all editors played it safe, and were as indecisive as Codex policies are, there would be no Codex. One rule of thumb is to use whatever the games have in their texts and documentation. If not, use the style you learned in English class. Another slower but more methodical approach is to seek consensus before doing anything. When in doubt, take some initiative, tempered by your command of the English language, and, of course, your knowledge of that which you are writing.

Consistency of style
If an article uses two different styles, then the decision is a little easier. The Codex might be a hodge-podge of different styles, but articles shouldn't be. This means that if the text is written from a past tense POV, then keep it in the past. If a word is repeated, then it should be spelled the same in each instance, even if two spellings are correct.

Scope
These standards only apply to the Codex core. Talk pages are highly informal, and other non-core pages do not need to follow these rules.

The Avatar
In most Ultimas other than Ultima VIII and Ultima IX the Avatar could be (but was not always limited to) male or female. Consensus from Talk:The_Stranger is that, in those cases, anything that could construe the Avatar as being incorrectly limited to one gender is to be avoided. Usually this comes down to avoiding pronouns like he or him. The solution is to chose a wording that avoids pronouns all together, even if this is at the expense of a sentence's smoothness. There is precedent for this in the documentation that accompanies the games, where no instance of pronouns are used in connection with the Avatar.

One solution that consensus rejects is the attempt to include all possible genders. This takes the form of he/she, him/her , and so on. Currently, many articles are written with this style, but they are being rolled back. Feel free to make corrections accordingly.

Anyone else
There are many other situations where gender is ambiguous since many texts discuss individuals who are generic. These would include those mentioned in articles about spells, equipment, etc. Origin quite liberally uses he as gender-neutral in these circumstances, however, there has been little discussion on this issue, and no consensus reached.

Capitalization
Normal English grammar rules apply. The greyer areas for which the Codex has set policy are the following: Note: using capitals to place emphasis on words might be useful in a simple text environment, but is unnecessary in an editor that offers italics, boldface, and all sorts of other typographical effects.
 * 1) Article names and section headings: the initial of the first word in an article or heading is to be capitalized. As for all other words, only the important words are to have capital initials. "Important" means nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Conjunctions, prepositions, articles, etc. are classified as unimportant.
 * 2) Proper nouns: obviously proper nouns should always have capitalized initials, but what counts as proper is much harder to determine. A lexicon contains all the nouns whose status has been decided.
 * 3) Quotes: as is typical with quotes, they should be taken verbatim. This includes capitalization. Magical syllables, for example, often appear in the games in upper case, so they should appear in the Codex the same way.

Italicization
A recent tradition here is to put all the names of the games in italics. Therefore, what is colloquially called "U8" is "Ultima VIII", "Ultima VIII: Pagan", or less commonly "Pagan".

Serpent Isle
There are many ways to essentially express the name of this reuse of Ultima VII's game engine ("Ultima VII Part 2", "Ultima 7.5", "Ultima VII Part II") but another recent standard is to change all the references to "Ultima VII Part Two" (plus "Serpent Isle" as needed).

Spelling (Ultima is always right)
Tradition, but not consensus, holds that Ultima is always right. For instance, Blue Tassles, is a misspelling according to the dictionary, but not according to Ultima. The correct Ultima spelling is "tassles", therefore the correct Codex spelling is "tassles".

In Britannia, spelling is not usually British. Origin System Inc. has always been an American company, and as such, usually spells things in the American fashion. There are exceptions, however, so again Ultima is always right. Therefore, there is "Honor" and "Valor" in Britannia but in Ultima II there is Pirates Harbour. Notice, too, that the article name for Pirates Harbour is missing an apostrophe&mdash;it should.

If there should ever be a contradiction among the games: you're on your own.

Pronunciation guides
Currently, the tradition is to sound-out words using familiar syllables. It is less accurate than IPA, but simpler and more intuitive and easily sufficient for Codex purposes. Take drax-in-oo-som : notice also the oo in bold. The boldfaced syllable is the accentuated syllable. Usually, these should only be used for words native to Ultima, when their pronunciation is known&mdash;no guessing or presuming.

Style of language
Tradition holds that it be formal; similar to that of Wikipedia. This means when not quoting, no regionalisms, dialect, colloquialisms or slang. No foul language should go without saying, but it does need said. Consider it said.

Mixing plural and possessive
You should not need the Codex to tell you this, because this should have been learned in grammar school. But unfortunately, even many professional writers of English are unable to withstand the temptation to put an apostrophe behind the s when pluralizing anything that isn't a simple, alphabetic word. Consequently, 1980's, POV's , and CPU's abound. They should not here or anywhere else. The decade that saw the release of the Apple ][ Ultimas was the "1980s". The sum of all editors here make for many "POVs". If your computer is multi-core, it has many "CPUs".

Remake information
Articles that only contain remake information should have a remake banner placed at the top of the article.

In articles that also contain canon information the information specific to to a remake should be placed under its own section header. The section header should be the proper name of the remake e.g. Ultima V: Lazarus or Ultima 6 Project. The remake banner should be placed immediately following the section header. See Wayfarer's Inn or Lord Shalineth for examples.

Character quoting
When placing character quotes into an article, make it indented on a new line and in italics. Placing quotes around the text in addition to these measure is unnecessary.

Trivia lists
While every effort should be made to incorporate content into the main body of the article, there are circumstances where information might seem out-of-context and more suitable for a Trivia list. These should ideally contain legitimately interesting facts that people might not know about, and not be a dumping ground for useless information or an excuse to voice personal opinions and/or speculations. Some examples of good trivia might be:


 * Geoffrey is based on Jeff Hillhouse, the first outside employee of Origin in 1983. He served as the Head of Operations.
 * In Ultima VII, almost all of the inhabitants of Serpent's Hold resemble the Enterprise crew from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
 * A "real" Orb of the Moons trinket was shipped with every copy of Ultima VI when it was first sold.