Forum:Manual of Style

I think it's about time we create a Manual of Style. We've been here long enough without one.

So breaking this down into sections. ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) current discussion Jan 13, 2008 @ 09:14 (UTC)

Section order
We need an order for our sections to be put in.

Here's what I'm thinking:
 * (main) - The beginning section with general intro. This is the one without a section name.
 * Background - Historical and background information on the character.
 * Personality - Information on the character's personality.
 * Abilities - Information on the characters special abilities and techniques.
 * Other info - Things like Naruto's history with the Demon fox should be placed in this area. Or perhaps made as a subsection of an appropriate section.
 * Part in the story - Section container, the characters actions within the story would be here.
 * Part I
 * Some arc
 * Part II
 * Some other arc
 * Trivia - Trivia items. Organized in list format using * at the start of the line (Stylistically a space after that * would be nice.)
 * Quotes - Character quotes. The character shouting out a Jutsu name shouldn't be considered a jutsu though. Organized in the same way as Trivia. If there are multiple language forms to a character quote, it should link to an article like Dattebayo and Believe it!.
 * Sources - A special section for general sources such as the various data books which info comes from.
 * References - Just the ==References== section with a tag below it. To collect the tag info in the page. Individual bits of info should be tagged with specific citation other than just the general sources section.

My main points on this are:
 * Abilities should be above the part in the story as the pits (>.< lol), can get quite long and the Abilities should be grouped with the other stuff that's about the character.
 * Trivia and Quotes should still remain at the bottom of the page as they have very little notability.
 * The Part I and Part II sections should be inside of a proper ==Part in the story== section instead of just thrown into their own sections.
 * ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) current discussion Jan 13, 2008 @ 09:14 (UTC)

Other points

 * "Articles should be written in past-tense, not present or future tense." ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) current discussion Jan 13, 2008 @ 09:14 (UTC)
 * "Articles should be written in an in-universe style, and not refer to the reader or viewer when talking about events." ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) current discussion Jan 13, 2008 @ 09:14 (UTC)

Article size
Many of the articles in this wiki are too small, the articles such as Jonin should be conglomerated into larger articles, or if these pages already exist, should have the areas expanded. Small articles look bad if a wiki wants to look credible. Also, change the css stylesheet, it looks horrible with the orange on white. Whinge over, now I might start doing some contributions StijnX 20:22, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
 * The Narutopedia plans to incorporate the use of Semantic MediaWiki when it is installed on Wikia. If articles are grouped together, then we lose the ability to do that. Semantic Attributes is what is going to allow us to easily generate the large lists automatically, and also allow users to search for things like, all the Female Ninja, who are part of Konohagakure. But what we can do is use DPL to create articles which include a summary from the other articles into the more general page. As for the stylesheet, feel free to come up with a better one, but this one was created to have some relevance to Naruto. We're not going to just wipe it out and go back to horrid white on white, :/ on white... The way to fix a stylesheet, is not to complain, but to point out ways to improve it, then you might actually change something. Otherwise people will ignore your complaints. ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) current discussion Jan 20, 2008 @ 09:14 (UTC)