Help:Manual of Style

Note: This Manual of Style is a work in progress and needs much material added.

See also: Category:Guidelines for a listing of Lotro-wiki guidelines. And Help:Contents for other Help pages.

This style guide (or style manual) is a set of usage and formatting standards for the writing and design of pages on the Lotro-Wiki.

Language usage

See also: Help:Spelling and Punctuation and Help:Names

Always follow in-game usage of capitalization, spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation. - While errors may creep into the game, they are usually corrected in subsequent updates to the game.

Keep in mind that the game follows the spelling conventions used by Professor Tolkien (i.e "British English"). Be wary of applying Modern American spelling conventions where they likely do not apply.

For example: Use Armour rather than Armor; Defence instead of Defense; Connexion instead of Connection.

This also includes the use of "Special Characters" (diacritics) — vowels with Accent Acute and Circumflex are available at the bottom of the editing screens and should be simply "clicked" on to insert the character into the text.

Teach your spell checker Lotro

All modern web browsers support active spell checking, or installation of such plugins. For ease of use while editing the Lotro-wiki, you may wish to set it to British English.
While editing, append to the spell-checker's dictionary when needed. Also, usage of language translations are also widespread throughout Lotro. So you may wish to add words from Middle-earth's many languages, such as Sindarin or Cirth, which you may frequently encounter in your editing work.

Specific usage examples

Creatures and Mobs

Use "Creatures" when referring to enemies outside an instance
Use "Mobs" when referring to enemies inside an instance

Use "Defeat" rather than "Kill"

When the morale of a creature is depleted, the creature is considered to be "defeated", not "dead."
This is also true of a Player character - the character is never said to be killed, only defeated.
When defeated, a character is either "revived", or retreats to a "Rally Point" (which are not called Resurrection (or Rez) circles).

Wikifying articles

To "Wikify" means — to focus on improving the layout and formatting of articles.

Articles should be wikified if they contain few or no links to other articles ("wikilinks"), contain HTML tags that should be replaced with wiki markup, or need reformatting to conform to Lotro-Wiki's formatting guidelines - see: Boilerplates.

How to wikify an article

Check for copyright violations. Long segments of text without wikilinks can indicate that the text was illegally copied into Wikipedia. Look for other red flags. Instructions for reporting violations are at Wikipedia:Copyright problems.
Add wikilinks. Where appropriate, make links to other articles by putting "[[" and "]]" on either side of relevant words (see WP:LINK for more information) and check that your links work as expected. Note that dates should not be linked purely for the purpose of autoformatting; in general, consensus is that there are very limited instances where linking of dates is desirable. Please do not link terms that most readers are familiar with, including common occupations (e.g., "writer"), well-known geographical terms (e.g., "United States"), or everyday items (e.g., "milk").
Format the lead. Create or improve the lead paragraph. It should "define the topic, establish context, explain why the subject is interesting or notable, and summarize the most important points".
Arrange layout. Arrange section headings as described in the appropriate boilerplates.
Replace HTML tags with wiki markup, where available. Use of HTML tags is discouraged where equivalent wiki markup exists: for example, replace <b>bold text</b> with '''bold text'''. However, HTML is permitted where no corresponding wiki markup exists: e.g., H<sub>2</sub>O for subscripts and   for a non-breaking space. See Help:Wikitext examples for a useful list of common wikitext and appropriate HTML markup.
Add an infobox if appropriate.
Missing Coordinates. Does an article about a place or building not have the coordinates? Find the coordinates and add them, using {{Tooltip Coords}} with the appropriate region parameter.
Remove the Wikifi tag. This will remove it from the list of tagged pages.
Save your changes!

Creating articles

Article Creation — discusses basic information about creating a page. When creating an article, use the appropriate Templates / Boilerplates.
Help:Names — discusses some general issues with page names
Help:NPCs — discusses creating articles for NPCs.
Help:Crafting — discusses creating articles for Crafting
Help:Items — discusses the Item namespace and creating articles about Items.
Help:Quests — discusses the Quest namespace and creating articles about Quests.
Help:Images — discusses the process of creating and adding Images and Icons.
Images are in .JPG format; Icons are in .PNG format.

Use Talk (Discussion) pages!

Be certain you check the "Talk Pages" associated with all of the various Template, Boilerplate and similar pages. (The "Discussion" tab at the top of every page.) They frequently contain information about the particular subject, which is not contained elsewhere, as well as, usually, the most current discussion about the subject.

Create articles automatically

The several entries in the Article Creation section of the Help page (easily found from the left panel on every page of the Lotro-Wiki) allow the creation of an article by the simple act of "naming" it.

The appropriate template and boilerplate is then inserted into the page in the appropriate namespace.

The Help section contains an article: "How to use the Article Creation section," which provides more information on the creation of articles.

For example, to create a new "Item," click on the "Items" entry in the "Article Creation" section. This brings up the page "Create New Item." just enter the name of an item you want to create a page for. The "Item:" prefix will be added automatically to the page name and the appropriate template(s) will appear in the new page editing area for you to fill out. The boilerplate explaining the entries you are expected to complete will appear at the top of the page (outside the editing area.)

Project pages

The "Project pages" contain style information for their various areas as well as specific editing projects

Categorization - A primary document
Characters - concerns races and player character classes, including skills, traits, stats, equipment and customization.
Crafting - concerns the various Vocations and Professions and their output

Colours

Lotro-Wiki Standard colours are defined in MediaWiki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Common.js
The Lotro Wiki default or standard colour scheme is "purple" for general articles and tables.

WikiTable

Background: transparent / Lettering: Black / Good Link: Blue / Bad-Link: Red

mptable — Monster Play articles are Orange and Black.

Background: Black / Lettering: moccasin / Good Link: lightgreen / Bad-Link: linegreen / Headers: Orange

Standard Lotro colour usages:

Colours used to indicate Quality

Quality
	White	Common
	Yellow	Uncommon
	Purple	Rare
	Cyan	Incomparable
	Orange	Epic

Colours used to indicate Level
(Relative to yourself)

Grey	9 or more levels below
Green	6-8 levels below
Turquoise	3-5 levels below
Blue	1-2 levels below
White	Same level as yourself
Yellow	1 level above
Orange	2-4 levels above
Red	5-7 levels above
Purple	8 levels above

Major Lotro-Wiki Projects
Categorization • Character • Crafting • Creatures • Deeds • Documentation • Effects • Game Guides • Images • Instances • Lore • LOTRO Store • Monster Play • NPCs • Quests • Skirmishes • System Tools • World Expansion projects: Mordor