Jurassic Park wiki:Manual of Style

Jurassic Park wiki's Manual of Style is a collection of guidelines and rules of thumb that are designed to set a standard format and appearance for all of its articles. In addition to accuracy and completeness, one of the major goals for which Jurassic Park wiki strives is consistency.

This Manual of Style is designed to make articles:


 * 1) easy to read and understand,
 * 2) organized and consistent,
 * 3) attractive to the reader, and
 * 4) easy to edit

Of course, none of these rules are set in stone. They are merely what the creators and editors of Jurassic Park wiki currently feel is the best way to accomplish the above goals. Keep in mind that, like Jurassic Park wiki itself, the Manual of Style is a work in progress, so if you come across something that's missing, feel free to either add a description of how you feel is the best way to organize an aspect of the site, or discuss possible options on the discussion page. Remember that everyone has a say in how Jurassic Park wiki is created.

Article names
There are some general rules regarding how articles on Jurassic Paek wiki should be named.


 * Article names should be in singular form, not plural. The only exceptions are things which always appear in plural form in the English language, such as binoculars or boltcutters.


 * The titles of articles about characters should be the name by which the character was most commonly known in the the Jurassicverse, with later names preferred to earlier ones, and full names preferred to partial names or nicknames. Titles such as "Captain," "Doctor," "Agent" or "Mister" should be omitted.


 * Unless the name of the article contains a proper noun, only the first word should be capitalized.


 * Abbreviations such as "CIA", "DoD", and "FBI" should not be used. Rather, they should be written out in full (Center for International Affairs, Department of Defense and Federal Bureau of Investigation) with the a redirect page created for the abbreviation (see "Redirects" below).


 * Disambiguation tags may also be necessary in the title. See below for more information.

Disambiguation
Disambiguation is the process of resolving ambiguity, the conflict that occurs when a term is closely associated with two or more different topics. In many cases, this word or phrase is the "natural" title of more than one article; however, disambiguation may also serve to differentiate more than one similarly titled article for a reader. Essentially, disambiguations are paths leading to different topics that share the same term or a similar term.

There are three ways to disambiguate on Jurassic Park wiki:

Disambiguation tags
Disambiguation tags are usually necessary for people, places or things which share the same name. These tags appear in the title in parentheses, eg. (Jurassic Park), (Operation Genesis), (actor), etc. Deciding what to title a tag can be tricky, but it should be consistent.

In the case of characters with the same name, tags should indicate which film or novel they appeared. In the case of two characters from the same film or novel, title, position or affiliation may be used to distinguish. These same rules should be applied to non-character articles as well, if possible.

Disambiguation tags usually won't be necessary for locations. If two locations share the same name, the titles of the articles should be expanded to be more specific. For example, "Portland, Oregon" and "Portland, Maine". "Portland" would then be made into a disambiguation page (see below).

Situations for creating disambiguation tags may vary drastically, so there can be no set rules, but editors are asked to keep them as clear and consistent as possible.

Disambiguation pages
As illustrated above, the most common form of disambiguation page on Jurassic Park wiki distiguishes between character names. If two characters share an identical name or more than two characters share similar names, a separate disambiguation page is created.

For example, if there exist three characters named "Bob Smith," "Bob Jones" and "Bob Miller," no disambiguation page is needed. However, if there later appears a character named simply "Bob," a disambiguation page will need to be created (titled "Bob"), listing all four characters alphabetically with descriptions and links to their proper pages. The page for the character known only as "Bob" page will contain a disambiguation tag such as "(Jurassic Park)" or "(The Lost World)." If any other simply named Bob is later created, new disambiguation tags will be used, as illustrated above.

Note that these rules apply exactly the same for last-name-only characters, as well as locations and items which share the same name.

Redirects
Occasionally, certain characters or items are known by more than one name or more than one spelling. In most situations, it's wise to create redirect pages for any and all alternate titles that may be queried when looking for a specific article.

To create a redirect page, type the following in the edit field:
 *  #REDIRECT RealArticle  

Article introduction
Every page should begin with an introduction, briefly summarizing the article for the reader. The introduction should give a quick explanation of what the article is about and establish its context. The length of the introduction can vary from a single sentence to multiple paragraphs. The title or subject of that article should appear in the first line in bold. Even though the article title is already listed, it's useful to emphasize the article's subject for the reader.

Headlines and sections
To create a new section in an article, surround the text with two or more == (equal signs). The wiki engine will automatically create a table of contents once there are four or more headers in an article.

The first word and all proper nouns of the header should be capitalized, and all other words lowercase.

Please avoid using links in headers. Depending on the browser's default settings, some users may not be able to see the links properly. It is much more useful to place the appropriate link in the first sentence after the header.

Perspective and tense
There exist two perspectives of articles on Jurassic Park wiki, "in-universe" and "out-of-universe." In-universe describes things which exist within the world of Jurassic Park, while out-of-universe describes things which exist in the real world. For example, Eric Kirby exists in-universe, while Trevor Morgan exists out-of-universe.

In-universe
All in-universe (IU) articles are to be written in the past tense, from the perspective of someone documenting the events from the far future. This creates consistency across all in-universe articles and eliminates the necessity of subjectively deciding when an unresolved loose end is no longer "current" or "recent." Additionally, although much of Jurassic Park takes place in our future, the future tense should never be used in in-universe articles.

Other than specific background information sections of the page, the main body of in-universe articles should never refer to the series Jurassic Park or any real life things such as actors, episodes or the like.

Out-of-universe
Out-of-universe (OOU) articles are to be written from a real life point of view, using a combination of past, present and future tense. For example, the biography of an actor may include all three tenses:


 * Jane Snow was born in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1953. She currently plays the role of Lola McElroy on 24.  Snow will be appearing in the upcoming film Full House: The Movie.

Articles about films, books, comics, games, or other real life Jurassic Park story material should contain a detailed synopsis of events, written in the simple present tense.

Real-life in-universe
Jurassic Park is a series of films and books which is set in the real world. While the characters and some other things such as the dinosaurs are fictional, much of what is referred to in the series are things which exist in the real world. When writing in-universe articles for these things, it's important to only include information that was actually given in the series, and not assume that other "known" facts exist within the JPverse as well. For example, Montana is the location of Grant's dig sites, however it would be inappropriate to include its current population or the year of its incorporation unless it was specifically revealed in the series.

Sometimes however, no information is given about a real life article and it is necessary to add one or two establishing facts in order for there to be enough to even create an article. This should be kept to a minimum and only done when absolutely necessary.

Additionally, it's often useful for a reader to learn more about a real-world subject as it establishes context for the events in the series. This can be achieved by posting facts under the "Trivia" section and/or linking to an external site, such as Wikipedia.

Keep it simple
Above all else, you are encouraged to keep your articles simple! Don't try to get too fancy with your markup (like embedding tables within tables). The easier the markup is, the easier it will be for anyone to edit the article later on. Our first goal is to reliably and accurately display the information. The goal of wiki markup is to keep the articles simple and to emphasize the information as much as possible. We prefer content over form. For this and other reasons, HTML markup should be avoided in most circumstances.