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.

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.

Categories

In general, pages should list any super-categories that their categories belong to. Example:

The 1k (1000) article uses

[[Category:New Human]]
[[Category: TTP2 Characters]]
[[Category: Characters]]
[[Category: TTP2]]

There is no super-category for Terminal Documents because there is no desire to see a list of documents from both TTP1 and TTP2 together.

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 are cannot find an item to place on the pressure plate
| hint = The fan is detachable.
}}

produces

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

[ hint ]

The fan is detachable.