VNDev Wiki:Manual of Style

This Manual of Style (abbreviated MoS) is the guide for writing all content for the VNDev Wiki.

Articles vs Guides

Articles

Articles are informational and encyclopedic in nature. Their purpose is to, as objectively as possible, document the visual novel development space and its components, including prominent individuals, companies, and titles, as well as the components and techniques of development itself. Articles are not meant to teach the reader how to develop, nor to prescribe best practices. It may be appropriate to note if a particular technique is popular or industry-standard, but such information should serve a documentation, not advice, purpose. Articles should be written in standard American English.

Guides

Guides are instructional and prescriptive in nature. They are primarily written by one user or a small group of users, and serve as a tool for passing on advice and techniques to less experienced developers. Guides typically contain advice, suggestions, and/or step-by-step tutorials. Guides may be written in the author's preferred dialect or language, but titles of guides must be written in standard American English.

Appropriate topics

Article topics

The subject of an article must be:

• Specific: Well-defined, does not significantly overlap with other articles.
• Notable: Has been discussed at some length, including by people who did not originate/create the topic. For example, Doki Doki Literature Club warrants an article because it has been significantly discussed by the community, but not every released visual novel does.
• Substantive: There is a significant amount of information about the topic that is useful to visual novel developers. The article, in its finished state, will be longer than a few sentences, not be a simple dictionary definition.
• Directly related to visual novel development

Guide topics

The topic of a guide must be:

• A skill, process, or technique useful to visual novel developers
• Distinct enough from other guides to be useful. Multiple guides on the same topic may exist, but each should provide a different strategy, method, or way of thinking, such that the guides are not duplicative of each other.

Page titles

The titles of all guides must be prefixed with "Guide:" with no space following (as in Guide:Finding a team on DevTalk). Guides in a language other than English must have titles which end with the language in parentheses, such as "Guide:Designing sprite expressions (Spanish)". All titles (both guides and articles) must be:

• Written in sentence case. Capitalize only the first word, except for proper nouns or other words for which capital letters are always used.
• Recognizable – The title is a name or description of the subject that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize.
• Natural – The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles. Such a title usually conveys what the subject is actually called in English.
• Precise – The title unambiguously identifies the article's subject and distinguishes it from other subjects.
• Concise – The title is no longer than necessary to identify the article's subject and distinguish it from other subjects.
• Consistent – The title is consistent with the pattern of similar articles' titles.
• Lacking acronyms, except when the acronym is the most common name for the subject
• In singular form (Sprite instead of "Sprites")