Style Guide

Hello! It's Balketh, your friendly neighbourhood admin! Due to a recent mistake on my part that caused a player significant negative emotions, I have endeavoured to word-vomit some unrefined clarity on the intent of the Wiki. This Style Guide will hopefully rapidly evolve and separate into different sections, and serve as a hub for contributors of the wiki to align their works with the wiki's goals. It's not perfect, far from it, and currently serves as a statement of intent. Please give me the benefit of the doubt here; I'm trying my best, and am genuinely doing this for all of us, to produce something better than a roll20 scratch-pad v2.0.

I would like to begin by make contributors aware that the admin reserve, maintain, and exercise the right, as per Wikia's guidelines and rules, to edit pages for formatting and consistency, regardless of who created or maintains the pages, so as to achieve the goals of a consistently styled, setting-factual, neutral database of information (with enjoyable flavour scattered all over). Specifically in the realm of PC/GM-contributed pages, concessions will be made, on-going: no edits will be made to your character's content in terms of narrative, chosen descriptors, your narrative style, or any other setting-factual, author-written content.

Changes like page structure, formatting of text, tables, infoboxes and other in-page tools may be made without request, and will be noted in the change summaries. In all cases, edits will be for the purposes of consistency and quality across the wiki. Changes sought regarding the setting-factual, written content of a player's PC's article will only be requested of the author of that PC; your consent is paramount, and I'd always prefer you write it so it's in your third-person textual voice. Compromises can and will be made in regards to player article content, but the current and on-going goal, again, is a consistently styled, setting-factual, enjoyable-yet-neutral database of information, in line with the core functions of a wiki as a searchable repository of organised facts. This ties into the lofty end goal of a dual purpose: producing a wiki that can serve both as a possible candidate for the  (Un) Official Stonetop Wiki, and as a place where we, and possibly others, can store their campaign information in separate, but still wiki-integrated areas.

This isn't an indication to throw in the towel on effort in creating articles to any kind of formatted quality; quite the opposite. This is an acknowledgement of failure on my part to provide these tools before opening the wiki to contributor editing. It also serves as notification of a desire to provide structure for wiki input sooner, rather than later, so we can continue producing a truly excellent, consistent resource for all of us, and others! It's not the case that 'all effort is off, just throw info up and let Balketh sort it out', and to be clear, I expect of exactly 0 people reading this to do that, because you're all genuinely awesome; I've just been a poor admin; my first task should have been a style guide, but I had to learn the system through my character's page before I could produce one - that's on-going. It is worth restating in a clearer and clearer manner, however: wiki pages that subvert the style guide by being intentionally awful in some manner, and/or subvert the intent of the wiki, and generally do so on a consistent, intentional basis, won't remain editable and/or public; they will be protected, and will be adjusted thereafter to match the format of the rest of the wiki. Mistakes are perfectly acceptable and harmless as long as they're fixed at some point in the reasonably foreseeable future.

What about all the other creative content that can and will be generated for a passion project or game, that doesn't fit into the wiki's intended function and structure?! This is that for which BLOGS exist! Blogs can only be edited by YOU and the Admin, and the Admin strive to be supremely lenient with blog content! Unique blogs exist for each account, accessible from the 'Blogs' tab on your User Profile. In addition, style guide requirements are severely decreased on your blog, though there is/will be a set of guidelines to prevent intentional abuse of the blogs. All general wiki-formatting tools are available for blogs, and they act like wiki pages that are directly attributed to your account. Reasonably formatted and 'reasonably' setting-factual (regardless of narrative perspective used) blogs may be linked to relevant places in wiki pages, mostly for PCs, backgrounds, first person narrative, player-sourced discussions/features/writings about/for their characters that don't fit the neutral format of the wiki pages, etc.

Intentional farcical statements/recounts, player opinion or other unconfirmed or unspecific, non-setting-factual content should still preferably be delivered as perspective, or other valid setting-factual forms, such as 'from X's perspective', or 'as Y remembers it', or 'Z believes this', etc. This can also be conveyed in narrative tone; first person narrative inherently comes with the Unreliable Narrator trope, etc. Blogs that are simply inappropriate, problematic, off-topic, or otherwise largely, consistently and intentionally against the given content and formatting of the wiki (disputing facts without phrasing it as character perspective or player opinion, intentionally making a gods-ugly blog page, and then maybe linking it in inappropriate places, etc) will be locked and adjusted to better fit the wiki without request, or removed if deemed unsalvageable; this is specifically to allow for the removal of intentional, awful shit. This is not to remove, for example: hastily-written, completely unformatted, but mostly relevant game notes that may: reflect the last session, indicate narrative points from Character Y's point of view, contain quotes, mark their equipment gains/losses, note XP tallies, HP shifts, important info notes, and many, many more things, all of which are acceptable.

TL;DR: The desire is to make a high quality Wikipedia-style setting-factual database of information for Stonetop, as a possible 'official wiki' with a front-facing source of default info, in addition whole categories and areas dedicated to our campaign, and maybe others. Admin reserve the right to, and will change shit to align with all that, but not your character's narrative shit, of course. Please keep wiki pages neutral, setting-factual, third person, consistently-formatted and otherwise 'proper wiki styled'. Any content not befitting a wiki style of database should go in blogs, which are just wiki pages that are marked as 'user-attributed', and thus sport lessened formatting and content requirements. Blogs: free for all to use on a personal level; try to keep it neat/to the general vibe and visual of the wiki, but otherwise, go nuts. If it's relevant, it'll be linked in relevant places as the admin go, if you don't do it already. If it's intentionally bad in one way or another, we'll just cut it. That's about it, I think.

Thanks heaps. More soon. Please be patient. Love, Bear.