This article is part of a series on the encyclopedia’s Writing Guidelines *
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Info
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It’s not hard to notice: the Encyclopedia Mysenvaria takes heavy inspiration from the style of internet wikis, popularized by the likes of Wikipedia. I’m not a Wikipedia editor—in fact, I don’t know the first thing about writing a proper Wikipedia article. I’m winging this.
Many of the guidelines I follow when writing the encyclopedia exist only in my head, and that has led to inconsistencies. This writing guideline intends to fix that. The Encyclopedia Mysenvaria’s writing guidelines take from sites like Wikipedia.
If one wishes, they can think of this page as a modified version of the official in-setting documentation provided to all scholars contributing to the Academy Publishing Company’s initiative.
TLDR
Establishing Tone
All non-meta articles are canon in Mysenvar, that means they are written as if authored by a character within the setting. This means there’s a few key rules to keep in mind when writing an article:
- Don’t break the fourth wall. Mysenvar is the real world within the setting—it has no connection to the world we live in. Real life places, people, and things do not exist in Mysenvar and should not be referenced outside of the meta.
- Voice is not tone. Canonically the encyclopedia has hundreds of authors across its vast knowledge base, and different authors write with different voices.
- The tone is that of a real encyclopedia’s. Inversely, the encyclopedia canonically also has a team of editors who work tirelessly to maintain the encyclopedia’s academic tone. They ensure all text is matter-of-fact, unbiased, and research-based.
Maintaining the encyclopedia’s tone is one of the most important parts of writing for it. Failure to maintain the tone can mean readers break immersion, which is very important to the encyclopedia. It can also make text seem sloppy and disjointed.
Article Structure
The encyclopedia employs no strict header structure, though templates are provided for every given topic of the encyclopedia. These templates serve as loose suggestions, and may be edited as required for a given article.
The general structure of any article should be organized as thus:
- Metadata: This comes in the form of YAML at the start of each and every page. This data includes stuff like the page’s title, inclusion of the table of contents, and tags. Metadata cannot be left out of a page.
- Hatnote: Confusion may arise between articles which have matching titles but differing topics. The primary way to solve this is by adding hatnotes: a brief link at the top of an article or section which helps readers locate the article they may actually be looking for.
- Infobox:
- Body Text:
- See Also: A list of related articles which are not directly mentioned in the body of the article.
- Footnotes:
Titles
Metadata
Tags
Tags are an important part of making the encyclopedia easy to navigate while also helping with future development. All page’s are equipped with tags in the metadata, and generally there’s at least two tags per page: at least one topic tag, and at least one maintenance tag.
Topic tags are used to organize pages by topic, normally there’s at least one for the general topic of the page (E.G. history/biography or art/literature/non-fiction) and one for the more specific topic/series that the page is regarding (E.G. god/higher-god or star). Topic tags make it easier to navigate the encyclopedia as a reader, but also make it easier to find topics you’re interested in as a writer.
Maintenance tags are used to organize pages by progress, the amount of these on a page can range drastically depending on the needs of the page. These are broken down into two categories: progress tags, and want tags.
Links
Linking other articles is a very important part of making the encyclopedia easy to navigate, but they can quickly becoming overwhelming if there’s too many links in a single article. To help with that there are some basic rules to linking articles:
- Link to the same article once per article. It doesn’t make much sense to link to the article on the God of Water three separate times in one article, so only link it once on first mention.
- Too many links in one paragraph can make it hard to read. And so, if necessary, lower the density of links by spreading out their usage.
- Avoid adjacent links, they can be confusing to readers.
- Dates should only be linked to when they add to the content of the article. For instance, the years of birth for a specific character should likely not be linked if nothing from the articles on those years adds context to the character’s story.