Ultima Codex:Style guide

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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[edit]

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?[edit]

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[edit]

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[edit]

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.

Formatting[edit]

Capitalization[edit]

Normal English grammar rules apply. The greyer areas for which the Codex has set policy are the following:

  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.

Paragraphs, captions, and list items (including table cells) should abide by the same rules stated above, except the one refering to article names and section headings.

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.

Use of italics and quotes for proper nouns[edit]

The following guidelines apply to all page elements, including headings, and should be used for deciding if and when to apply quotes and italics for proper nouns:

  • Names of complete bodies of creative work should be italicized. This includes books (real or in-game), videogames, movies, TV series, music albums, etc. This therefore includes all Ultima games.
  • Names of portions of complete bodies of work should be put in quotes. This includes book chapters, TV series episodes, song names, etc.
    • Examples: "The Call to Adventure", "The Trouble With Tribbles", "Stones".

All other proper nouns (e.g. people, places, shops) should be neither italicized nor have quotes.

Principles[edit]

Inversion[edit]

Note there is an "inversion" principle. This means that when one principle makes a phrase or sentence italicized and a different principle usually makes some text within italicized, that subphrase will be unitalicized. For instance, text that uses Template:Main defaults all their text italicized, so: "This article is about something from Ultima IV". "Ultima IV" is usually italicized, but not when embedded in text that is italicized.

However when like principles overlap, no inversion is performed: "Ultima VI Clue Book". Game names are always italicizes for the same reason book names are, so they are all italics.

Italicizable text embedded in other text[edit]

Ultima IV should pretty well always be italicized when possible and not part of an inversion. When expressing the article name Ultima IV monster data is one such case. Time Stop is another example therefore: Time Stop scroll. Thanks to {{DISPLAYTITLE}} template it's even possible to properly format the article header, however, Wikimedia does not afford this ability to categories, so don't bother trying to italicize any of that.

Character quoting[edit]

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 measures is unnecessary.

Possessifying words ending in S[edit]

Some standards hold that there are no special rules for making nouns possessive when they end in S. Here, what seems more popular is an economy of S's, so "Exodus'", "Talorus'", "Paws'", etc.

Expressing game names[edit]

The proper short form to use for a numbered game is "Ultima" followed by the Roman numeral. According to standard typographical rules, game names should be in italics. Fortunately, a series of templates obviates remembering this.

Serpent Isle[edit]

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 the standard way is to use "Ultima VII Part Two" (plus ": Serpent Isle" as needed).

Non-breaking space[edit]

The non-breaking space is an HTML entity (expressed as   in the source editor) which displays a space, but prevents the text on the left and the right from being separated by things like word wrap. This is useful when text like "Ultima VI" appears around the end of the line, because it doesn't look good when you see "Ultima" on one line and "VI" on another. This is less likely to happen in a paragraph (although, keep in mind that your browser isn't the same width as everyone elses') but very likely to happen in places like captions.

Sure, HTML entities are ugly and nobody likes them. However, as editors our duty is to bear the ugliness for the benefit of the reader. Fortunately, you can have it both ways for most cases, as we have fashioned templates for 99% of the cases where the non-breaking space is called for. For instance, every time you need to express a game name, just use {{Ultima VI}}. The wiki will then display the name with the non-breaking space as well as the italic codes, which are necessary for all game names. This doesn't work as well for names where you want italics, a non-breaking space and a link. In that case, you'd use another template: {{U6link}}.

Lore Quotes[edit]

Using the LoreQuote tempate places in-game (including hard copy materials) quotes after the main article. Most rules in this article are not relevant when it comes to the text of lore quotes since the intent is to faithfully reproduce the quotes. Use your own judgement in deciding which is aspects of the quote are necessary to reproduce and what can be "painted over". For instance, if in a game manual a word is broken by a hyphen due to the end of a line, it would not be necessary to repeat that in the lore quote. On the other hand, if a word is spelled awkwardly, that spelling should be copied verbatim. Hard copy materials tend to have awkward uses of dashes. The correct way is to either use an em dash (so named since its width is supposed to be that of an "m") that join the two adjacent words or and en dash (the width of an "n") flanked by spaces. Game manuals will often use what looks more like an em em em em dash flanked by spaces! Try to approximate the (often erroneous) typesetting by using a single dash (using the entities — or –) flanked by whatever spaces are given (which may not be any). Unfortunately, they all do it differently, so here's how you will know. One last thing, some of the sources used to confirm all there we not the original (they actually changed typesetting for re-releases!) so there's also a notation indicating if it comes from the first edition:

Game Publication Dash Apostrophe* Quotes** Confirmed by
original source
Type Flanked
by spaces
U1 The First Age of Darkness† 2 hyphens yes
U1 "remake" — yes U+2019 oc
U2 The Second Age of Darkness — no U+2019 oc
U3 Secrets of Sosaria — yes U+2019 oc
The Book of Play ‡ ‡ U+2019 oc
The Book of Amber Runes — yes U+2019 –
U4 The History of Britannia — yes
The Book of Mystic Wisdom — yes U+2019 oc yes
Avatar Adventures — no U+2019 oc
U5 The Book of Lore — No before, yes after ' oc
Paths of Destiny hyphen yes U+2019 oc
U6 Compendium — yes
Cluebook — yes U+2019 oc
U7 Clue Book/Key to the Black Gate — yes U+2019 oc
The Book of Fellowship — no in text
yes in headers		 U+2019 oc
Isle of Fire Guide — yes
ROV man hyphen yes U+2019
U7.5 SS Play Guide — yes
Beyond Serpent Pillars — yes U+2019 oc
Alagner's Notebook 2 hyphens yes no
Clue Book/Balancing the Scales — yes U+2019 oc
UW1 Memoirs of Sir Cabirus — yes U+2019 oc
Clue Book — yes U+2019
UW2 Safe Passage — yes U+2019 oc
Player's Guide — yes
Gems of Enlightenment — yes
SE Ultimate Adventures — yes U+2019 oc
Clue Book/"Malone's" &mdash yes
MD Mysteries of the Red Planet — yes
U8 The Chronicle of Pagan — yes U+2019 oc
Pentology/Clue Book — yes
U9 Jaana & Goblin 1 hyphen yes
Ultima IX Strategy Guide — yes U+2019 oc

* For the most part the Unicode closing quote (’) is used, which is more correct than the ASCII single quote, but a modified keyboard to produce "’" would be more esthetic.
** oc: means "opening/closing". These use “ and ” or more estheticly '“' and '”', instead of the simpler ASCII double quote.
† In The First Age of Darkness there appear to be two types of books: one copy is labelled "remake"
‡ The Book of Play dithers on this: headings have hyphens, body text has —es flanked by spaces and lists have —es w/a space after them.

References[edit]

When adding to an article, this material should be justified with a citation. Don't let the current state of the Codex fool you; this is an important part of editing, it just hasn't been very popular to date. If adding citations to existing content, please take the opportunity to verify the passage in question is, in fact, accurately written; neglecting to do so defeats the entire purpose of this practice.

You place a citation with the <ref> tag. That is where the superscripted code will appear indicating the citation. After <ref> and before </ref>, you place the text containing the reference. The <ref> tag can also contain the "name" entity, such that the reference can be reused. For instance, if you wanted to reference the Magic Missile page in the Book of Mystic Wisdom more than once, you might choose to name the reference "MagicMissile", wherein your tag would be <ref name="MagicMissile">. In every citation for the Magic Missile following the first, you would use <ref name="MagicMissile" />. At the end of an article containing references you place a section References followed by nothing more than <references />.

The <ref></ref> tag should always be placed after the punctuation sign that goes after the sentence or phrase that needs the reference, with no spaces between the punctuation sign and the reference tag. In other words, reference tags will always appear right after a comma, semi-colon, or period.

For the text inside the "ref" tags, the following templates should be used for style:

Please see each template for further details on its usage.

When there are several references to be added different sentences in the same paragraph, adding one "ref" tag for each sentence or phrase can add too much clutter. In order to avoid it, it is enough to use one "ref" tag for multiple sentences, usually after the last referenced sentence in tha pargraph. If the reference is to a transcript, all the relevant keywords should be mentioned in that same "ref" tag. See Gwenno for an example.

Links[edit]

In general, links to other articles should appear once per level 1 section (aka. level 2 heading), the first time the term shows up in the text. Links may be repeated inside a level 1 section if there is a particular reason to do so, or they may be omitted in specific cases (such as when a section is very small), but this is left to the writer's judgement.

Navigation templates[edit]

Navigation template guide

Navigation templates have been created over time using a variety of styles. This becomes obvious when two templates with varying styles appear in the same article. This section will attempt to homogenize the more variable styles.

As you can see from opening the markup for any template, there are a great many styles used. We've condense it to the styles that tend to vary. There's also more discussion about issues on the talk page.

Font size Initial caps Notes Deprecated styles
Table 90% n/a
Superheader 120% Yes Italics, bold
Table header default Yes Not present for single-table navs. Italics, bold
Row header default Yes No special styling, but markup should be used to make the cell a row header. Italics, bold
Table data default No Line breaks and &nbsp;s should be used to prevent line breaks to appear in any sub-cell. Italics
Ankh delimiter default n/a Bold
  • Font size: expressed w/the "font-size" style
  • Initial caps: only capitalizes the initials on "important" words, which are nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives. If not used, only the first letter of the cell is capitalized, plus proper nouns' initials, of course
  • Notes: a "sub-cell" is the stuff between ankhs
  • Deprecated styles: these styles have been used for these entities, and my still in some cases, but are deprecated at this time

Writing[edit]

Style of language[edit]

Tradition holds that language be formal and objective, similar to that of Wikipedia's encyclopedic style. This means when not quoting, no regionalisms, dialect, colloquialisms, slang, or conversational tone. First-person and second-person personal pronouns (I, we, us, you), as well as contractions (e.g. it's, didn't, etc.), are examples of casual grammar that must be avoided. No foul language should go without saying, but it does need to be said. Consider it said.

Some leeway for flair has typically been afforded for in-game topics, which trend closer to the style of a fictional narrative. Exercise restraint, however.

Opinions and biases are always to be kept out of articles. It is not this wiki's place to take a stance on a given issue, therefore the reader should not be able to infer any contributor's personal views, nor be told what to think. Similarly, do not presume to speak for the fan base; there are as many opinions regarding the Ultima series as there are Ultima fans. This especially means no weasel words like "Many Ultima fans believe..." etc.

Spelling (Ultima is always right)[edit]

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—it should.

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

Gender when ambiguous[edit]

The Avatar[edit]

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 will not be used is the attempt to include all possible genders. This takes the form of he/she, him/her, and so on.

Anyone else[edit]

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.

Mixing plural and possessive[edit]

Don't mix-up possessive and plural when dealing with acronyms or years. For example, 1980's, POV's, and CPU's should be "1980s", "POVs" and "CPUs".

Pronunciation guides[edit]

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—no guessing or presuming.

Structure[edit]

Spell articles' names[edit]

As some articles about spells have information on a spell that has been called differently in different games, the following policy should be used when naming the article:

  • Use the name for the spell more often repeated between games.
  • If there are two or more names equally repeated, or the spell has a different name for every game it appears in, use the newest name (the one used in the latest game).

All other names should be redirects, and should be mentioned at least in the corresponding spell infobox section.

General article structure[edit]

Every article in the wiki should follow the following general structure for its main sections: 

* Banners
* Infobox
* <Article Contents and Sections>
* LoreQuotes
* Trivia
* See also 
* References
* External links
* Nav bars
* Categories

The "Banners", "Infobox", "Nav bars" and "Categories" are not actual sections, but "zones" in the article. All the sections and zones are optional, but should they appear in an article, they should be in the order indicated above.

All articles should open with an introductory passage providing a summarized definition of the subject in question, with further elaboration contained in the main body below.

Remake information[edit]

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 The Ultima 6 Project. The remake banner should be placed immediately following the section header. See Wayfarer's Inn or Lord Shalineth for examples.

Trivia lists[edit]

Trivia lists should be avoided when possible, as they tend to become a repository of facts that should be inside the article itself. 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 not directly related to the main purpose of the article, or which are of secondary importance to the rest of the content. If the Trivia section of an article starts getting too long, that is usually an indication that either new sections are required for the article, or at least some rework would be useful to integrate part of that list into the article.

Trivia lists should not serve as an outlet for personal opinions, observations, or speculation. Certain nitpicks can be considered acceptable, provided they are founded upon an objective supporting argument (e.g. clear inconsistencies between games) and adhere strictly to fact.

Examples of good trivia might be as follows:

  • 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.

Appendix[edit]

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