Writing Guidelines

Meta

This article is part of a series on the encyclopedia’s Writing Guidelines.

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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. Prior to this article most of the guidelines I followed existed only in my head, and that led to inconsistencies. This article is intended to fix that problem. Many of the guidelines here are taken from or motivated by guidelines from other wikis¹.

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.

At the end of the day all things presented in this article are simply guidelines. Consistency is the key to keeping the writing throughout the encyclopedia engaging and immersive. Sloppy and disjointed articles break the illusion for readers and dissuade their interest in the project. But text only gets you so far, and it’s best practice not to sacrifice the story in the service of writing.

Establishing Tone & Style

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 tonal 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 academic, like 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.

If non-meta articles are canon though, why are they in English? Well, you can think of them as having been perfectly translated, hopefully maintaining all the intricacies of their original language. It’s important to keep the English used consistent though, and so there’s a few key grammatical rules to keep in mind too:

• Writing should be concise. There’s no reason to use two words where one will do. Articles should remained focused on their particular topic too, there’s no reason for tangents when you can redirect users to another article.
• Spelling should remain consistent. The encyclopedia uses standard American English, not British English. In the case where there are two acceptable variants of a word the more common variant should be used.
• Academia is impersonal and neutral. Page’s should be written from a neutral point of view. They should state facts, but not exclude significant opinions where justified. They should also remain nonjudgmental.

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 description and link at the top of an article or section which helps readers locate the article they may actually be looking for.
• Meta Callouts: There’s a number of callouts which articles may need at their top. Callouts let readers know meta information about the page they’re reading.
• Infobox: Infoboxes are standardized non-meta callouts which serve to provide readers with a very brief overview of an article’s topic.
• Body Text: Articles should start with a lead section which provides a brief overview of the topic and then may be divided into distinct sections via headers. Headers should follow title case.
• See Also: A list of related articles which are not directly mentioned in the body of the article.
• Footnotes: Footnotes provide supplementary content for the main body of the article, including images, videos, and sources.

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.

Footnotes

1. Wookieepedia, Memory Alpha, Fandom, and Wikipedia are the most notable which I took from. ↩