Meta:Writing Conventions

Below are writing conventions that should be consistent throughout the wiki.

The #writing-conventions channel on Discord is used to discuss existing and new conventions before they are added here.

Capitalization

Following Wikipedia's style, this wiki strives to avoid unnecessary capitalization. In particular, article titles and section headers should use lowercase for words after the first word, unless there are proper nouns or acronyms. Puzzle elements should be written in lower case (again with exception for acronyms) in a paragraph, for example:

The first room of this puzzle contains a red emitter, an RGB converter, and a pressure plate that controls access to a second room.

The names of all puzzles are considered proper nouns and are thus written in title case ("Title Case"). Category names are sometimes written in title case. Certain phrases, such as "the Simulation" and "the Founder" are capitalized to match the formatting of the game. Also to match the game's format, the playable character of the sequel is "1k" with a lowercase k.

Screenshots

Use Photomode to remove HUD elements and Ultra settings. Use 4K resolution (3840 × 2160) if your display supports it. Otherwise use the highest 16:9 aspec ratio you can use. Convert PNG screenshots to JPEG before uploading.

Links

General practice on wiki sites is to only use a link for the first occurrence of a term in a paragraph or article. For example, the second use of "New Jerusalem" towards the end this paragraph is not a link:

The softness of New Jerusalem becomes more and more pronounced. There is a kind of madness in what we are doing, going to a place that is so hostile to our existence. That does not mean there is nothing to love here. There is in fact a great beauty, but it is a hateful beauty, a beauty you can only love because there are places that are not like this. And yet it is precisely this hateful beauty that the people of New Jerusalem fail to see, and so cannot understand their own blessings.

However, in puzzles it may be helpful to provide link to elements like connectors and fans multiple times throughout the article. You can use your best judgement for this.

Article titles

In general, article titles should not use dashes and should not use parentheses unless required for disambiguation. One significant exception to this is the articles for New Humans, which should be formatted as Name (Number) when the serial number is known. Example: Byron (7).

Underscores

Because MediaWiki URLs use underscores for spaces, spaces and underscores are conflated. For pages with underscored titles, remember to add, for example, {{DISPLAYTITLE:Article_title}} to the source code when creating Article title. (For terminal documents this is done automatically by using the template described below).

Collectibles

Although every terminal document and puzzle has its own article, the lost labs and star monuments are described on their respective area pages and should not have their own articles.

Capitalization

As mentioned above, article titles (and section headers) should not capitalize the second word and later words unless they are proper nouns (including all puzzle names) or acronyms. Note that MediaWiki always displays the first letter of the title on an article's page as a capital. Thus, although "pressure plate" is the correct format to use in a paragraph or a link, the article itself shows "Pressure plate" at the very top.

Templates

There are many helpful templates you can use on this site.

Hex Strings

The games often contain strings of hexadecimal characters. Please use Template:HexString for all such strings, omitting the second argument if a translation is not known. Example:

{{HexString|00}} becomes 00 (no translation).
{{HexString|48656c6c6f|Hello}} becomes 48656c6c6f (translation available as tooltip).

There is also an automatically-generated list of pages with untranslated hex strings.

Terminal Documents

Every entry for a terminal document from the second game should start with Template:TTP2Document at the very top of the page (the Visual Editor can help you enter the expected information correctly). This will create the infobox and the header (in-universe document title) as well as add the page to the proper categories.

Spoilers and hints

For content that involves puzzle hints or other potential spoilers that you would like to be initially hidden, use Template:Spoiler or Template:ProgressiveHint.

Example 1:

{{Spoiler|Santa lives in the North Pole|secret location}}

produces

[ secret location ]

Santa lives in the North Pole

Example 2:

{{ProgressiveHint
| topic = If you cannot find an item to place on the pressure plate
| hint = The fan is dettachable.
}}

produces

If you cannot find an item to place on the pressure plate:

[ hint ]

The fan is dettachable.