Ultima Codex talk:Style guide

Non-breaking space
I think it should be used. I vaguely remember some hating on this HTML entity, but I think that was more about something that the rich text editor was insinuating into edits, and not something that the human editors could easily be blamed for. In any case, I think that the HTML people were wise to create it. Sometimes I find it weird when a line begins with "VI" and when the previous word is "Ultima", sometimes it does! This often happens in info boxes, which is why I bridge to two with "&amp;nbsp;". I'm not sure if this is the proper way to do typesetting (or even if "typesetting" is the correct term), but I'd like to put it in the style guide, if I can persuade you to see it that way. Oh, and Fenyx, have I got a bot request for you! AngusM 01:53, July 2, 2010 (UTC)


 * Hmm, it may be useful in some cases. But it tends to make source editing harder, so if used, it should be used sparsely and in some contexts only, I think.--Sega381 14:11, July 11, 2010 (UTC)

Use of italics and quotes for proper names
I'd like to suggest the following use of italics and qutoes, which we are somewhat already using, based on Wikipedia: Establishments like Folley Tavern should only be capitalized, no italics or quotes.
 * Italics:
 * Games
 * Books
 * Ships
 * Movies, Series, Music albums (for real life references)
 * Double quotes:
 * Songs
 * Book chapters
 * Series episodes (for real life references)

What do you think?--Sega381 14:11, July 11, 2010 (UTC)
 * If you can find ample instances of these being used in articles, I say feel free to add it. If you do, though, you should probably use clearer terms than some of those you have here. AngusM 21:06, July 14, 2010 (UTC)
 * Now that it's policy, it seems that the decision to italicize game names wasn't just a recent trend that someone pioneered, as I originally thought, but just proper form and style. Someone should probably remove that text I made specifically about how to handle game names, and then maybe add to that section that Sega(?) recently created. I'd do it myself, but I think others understand this better than I do. AngusM 04:06, August 8, 2010 (UTC)


 * Ok, merged. I left the Serpent Isle bit, though, as that is a different topic.--Sega381 04:23, August 8, 2010 (UTC)

Links on repetitive words
I used to think that the way things worked around here is that if you have a word in an article that is pertinent to another article, that you were supposed to link that word to that article on that word's first occurrence, and never again after within the same article. Now after seeing a few articles, I'm wondering if the scope of that rule is just within a section, meaning, you will again link words if they repeat after another level 2 heading. Which is it? Or "should it be" I should say, since it's not in the guide yet. AngusM 03:33, August 30, 2010 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I've wondered the same thing from time to time. I've been under the impression that it's only supposed to be the first occurrence in the entire article. --Terilem 03:37, August 30, 2010 (UTC)


 * That's probably not the wisest way to do it, though. Articles are sometimes big. Sections less so. Often readers' attentions are focused only on one section, so if that section omits links, they are apt to miss relevant articles. I vote we make it one link to a section.
 * And are all talk pages without automatically generated tables of contents? They can get pretty big, too, in which case, contents are valuable. AngusM 03:57, August 30, 2010 (UTC)

Capitals in image captions
Since we're on about capitals, what about capital initials in image captions? I don't see captions as being like section headers or article titles, so I think the same capitalization rules should apply to this as to paragraphs. AngusM 03:22, September 14, 2010 (UTC)


 * Agreed. I think that would be the best way of doing it.  Dungy 11:07, September 14, 2010 (UTC)


 * Agreed too. Captions are just sentences, not titles.--Sega381 18:52, September 14, 2010 (UTC)

Formatting for mantras, words of power, etc.
I've seen mantras and words of power handled in a couple of different ways around the wiki (allcaps, quotes, etc.). My understanding of grammar is that when citing words themselves, they should be italicized, which is what I've started doing whenever I encounter such cases. Do others agree with this? --Terilem 04:46, September 16, 2010 (UTC)


 * Yeah, we should have policy on this. Usually I see italics for words that come from a different language (loanwords, for instances, like "savoir-faire" or Latin words). But I don't see mantras and words of power as language, but just magical syllables. Those I'd be inclined to put in upper case. AngusM 05:47, September 16, 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, it is most certainly true of loanwords as well, but it's not quite the point I was making. Italics apply to words discussed as words, which I believe is what the mantras are on the wiki. For instance, it would be correct for me to write "I like the word cheese," not, "I like the word CHEESE." --Terilem 05:54, September 16, 2010 (UTC)
 * Obviously I go for the former. In fact, there's a bit in the style guide that deals with this. But I thought we were talking about mantras. I don't see the connection to your example. AngusM 18:31, September 16, 2010 (UTC)
 * We were talking about mantras; I was just using an everyday example to illustrate my point. Take, for instance, this line:


 * Meditating at the shrine, the traveler has to chant the mantra "MU", to find the ways of Compassion.


 * For the reasons I've discussed, I see no reason why that shouldn't be:


 * Meditating at the shrine, the traveler has to chant the mantra mu to find the ways of Compassion.


 * --Terilem 00:11, September 17, 2010 (UTC)
 * I can ask that schoolteacher/consultant, but I think for magical gibberish using upper case is what's typical.
 * We should be able to find some kind of net resource to consult on issues of typesetting and stuff, but I'm not even sure what to Google. AngusM 04:33, September 17, 2010 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I had a look around at some guidelines on proper usage of italics as well as Wikipedia's style guide, which is how I arrived at my view on the matter. I should probably specify that I'm referring more to when these words are used in the main content of an article, not in a table or infobox, etc. In the context I'm talking about, allcaps just looks... bad. --Terilem 07:53, September 17, 2010 (UTC)

Narrative for contingencies
Your classic narrative just has one chain of events. Computers, with their jumps and conditional branches, don't allow for that. So the narrative for a computer game requires a new paradigm, and, I believe, a policy for the Codex. Here're the ideas I have: AngusM 02:29, September 20, 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) All contingencies are discussed, while giving as much preference and validity as possible to each. I'm not terribly fond of this one, and implementing it to its fullest degree would be madness. I was researching Wilfred the other day, and realized that there are about a dozen ways in which he turns down the Avatar's offer to join the party, and only one way in which he accepts. A more reasonable way to implement this would be just to ignore many of the contingencies, or (in the case of Wilfred rejecting the party) to just lump various similar contingencies into one.
 * 2) Only specify one contingency as the main one, and any others can be tucked away in another section. This seems to happen most often, with the "other" section being "Trivia"&mdash;I almost never see "if" outside of a Trivia section. This, of course, invites a hail of controversy over what the "one" contingency should be. I would guess that unavatarly or game-stopping contingencies, like that which causes the destruction of Britiannia or the (unresurrectable) death of the Avatar, would be deemed not to be a main continency. But it won't always be so simple.
 * 3) A hybrid of 1. and 2. I've seen 1. get done very rarely, when it seems that there is more than one contingency wherein none of them are more obviously valid than the others. Of course, a hybrid would invite even more controversy. Well, that's what discussion pages and a consensus template (when we get it) are for.
 * 4) Something I haven't thought of yet.

Proposal for Unicode policy
I started this issue on Talk:Computer Ports of Ultima V.

Unicode is a wonderful character set, but with its dozen or so "planes" each one of which has 1000s of characters, there are a ton of valid characters that won't show up in people's browsers properly. I realized how serious this might be when I looked at Computer Ports of Ultima V and saw a bunch of "Apple �"-looking text where I expected to see "Apple ][". The "II" on that page is not the much older and therefore more reliable ASCII, but Unicode, which shows up fine for 2 other editors, but not for me. Since this could happen to others, I propose we adopt the following: I don't suppose we could force pages to use ISO-8849-1. I'm not crazy about forcing such a regional character set, but since this is an English language site, anyone whose system doesn't support ISO-8849-1 won't benefit from the Codex much. On the other hand, any character in ISO-8849-1 probably has widely supported Unicode counterparts. AngusM 05:36, September 21, 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) Never use Unicode when there's a perfectly usable ASCII/HTML alternative. This means we use ASCII characters, and HTML entities and tags. I've noticed Unicode superscript characters in tables for footnotes. These could be replaced with the likes of &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; or even better &lt;sup style="font-size: x-small;"&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; . I know, that's a mouthful, but the way I see it, editors should take on 100 shares of inconvenience to save readers one share.
 * 2) It could be more permissable when the symbols you are using aren't that crucial to the text. I noticed that there are these tables adorned with Unicode ankhs. I can't see those ankhs, which was a bit annoying, but I got over it, and was able to understand everything on the page anyway.
 * 3) If 1. and 2. don't apply, and you must use Unicode, then try to use a character that's widely supported. I have no idea how to do that. Perhaps there's a web site that lists that stuff. Googling "unicode +supported" didn't give me much joy.


 * I agree with the idea of not using Unicode if it is not really necessary. But I'm curious on why you're not seeing it. By now, all browsers should support Unicode, and the only reason I can think of for it not working is if there is some special configuration in that browser disabling Unicode (or maybe in mobile browsers too). Out of curiosity, what browser brand, version and language are you using (and on which OS)?--Sega381 18:59, September 21, 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm using the latest FF using Canadian English on WinXPHESP3, but the latest IE also had problems with what's on Computer Ports of Ultima V. I don't think that this is a browser issue, but the font I'm using. And it's not a matter of Unicode being completely unsupported, but just certain code points, such as the one that makes the ankh and "II". I can see a lot of other Unicode.
 * I don't think there's much helping anyone whose system doesn't support any Unicode at all. However, I think it could be rather a long time before most systems are able to support all code points. So I think we should try to avoid Unicode if we can, and especially avoid code points we think aren't well supported. AngusM 19:20, September 21, 2010 (UTC)
 * Interesting... it may be the fonts then that don't support all Unicode code points. If you want to know more about it, you could try googling for the font and what it supports. But anyway, I do agree that there is no need to use strange symbols in most of the cases.--Sega381 02:17, September 22, 2010 (UTC)

Italics for spell names?
I have no idea what would be grammatically sound for these, since spells obviously don't exist in real life. In the context of a sentence, Origin has done it both ways, tending towards un-italicized in older materials and italicized in later ones (i.e. U7 clue book, SI manual & clue book, U8 manual & clue book). I tend to prefer seeing the spell names in italics, myself. Thoughts? --Terilem 08:18, September 23, 2010 (UTC)


 * I'd be OK with italics. I don't like having them capitalized, and the few times I've removed the capitalization, it still doesn't quite feel right.  Dungy 11:20, September 23, 2010 (UTC)