Wowpedia:New Enhanced Writing Style

Articles on Wowpedia are written by a collaboration of many different individual editors. This process makes Wowpedia's articles the best, most complete, and always up-to-date source of World of Warcraft information. However, it also sometimes results in articles that are written in a style inconsistent with other articles, causing great confusion and a sense of unease in many of our readers.

The goal of this policy is to specify a consistent writing style for all future Wowpedia content. Should the policy be approved, existing articles can be deleted and rewritten to conform with it.

Article structure
The first step toward a consistent writing style is to ensure that all articles are formatted in approximately the same way. This section of the policy describes a few simple formatting rules you should always apply to pages.

Infoboxes
Every article requires an infobox. Infoboxes allow readers to derive information about the article without having to read a single sentence, and can communicate important facts about the subject of the article; for example, did you know that Stormwind City is affiliated with the Kingdom of Stormwind, or that Garrosh Hellscream is hostile to the Alliance, which incidentally has Hippogryph members, who are led by Cenarius, who is in turn affiliated with the forests of Kalimdor, which is ruled by, among others, Prophet Velen, the teacher of Anduin Wrynn, who is a Human?

If you're concerned about the length of your infobox, you can always use it to list trivia information loosely based on what you've observed in World of Warcraft. For instance, during the Purge of Dalaran, the Sunreavers had an army strength of "~5 Magisters" and "~Sunreaver Aegiss." Remember: if it's vague enough, nobody can prove that it's wrong!

Navboxes
Navboxes allow readers to quickly navigate between related articles. If an article can be thematically connected to several other articles (for example, if it concerns a dispel ability, or an item that makes you look like a cook), you should add a navbox to the end of the article to allow users to quickly navigate between related articles.

If you're concerned about the length of your navbox, advanced techniques can be employed to link together a large number of articles: see for instance an armor set article or any legendary item. Under no circumstances are simple categories sufficient: two clicks is one click too many when you need to get from Eye of Sulfuras to Heart of the Thunder King.

Use of images
Images make every article exciting, and provide a much-needed distraction from all of the text-filled paragraphs displayed alongside them. Be sure to use images appropriate for the article:
 * The wiki gnome displayed on the right is very appropriate for policy pages, and makes them look official.
 * Only TCG artwork is appropriate in class articles: after all, do we really want to show people how the game actually looks like?

Tagging sources of information and content introduced in expansions
It is important to let readers know where the information in the article or an article section comes from. Use templates like wotlk-section, bc-section, and mop-section to do so; for an example of correct usage, see the Cataclysm section of the Jaina Proudmoore article, where cata-inline template is used to certify that the contents of the Cataclysm section are indeed providing information about the Cataclysm expansion. These templates can also be used to denote when certain things happened, as illustrated in the Locations section.

In contexts where you do not necessarily have an entire section to tag with one of the templates mentioned above, you can use the mop-inline family of templates to communicate to the reader which expansion each notable axe, troll god, or boat was introduced in.

Use more links
Wowpedia is a wiki: it contains a large number of articles on virtually every topic imaginable, including but not limited to Magic, Sword, Epic, Treasure, Troll, Aethas Sunreaver, Epicus Maximus, Voodoo, Spider, Ruins of Southshore, Helcular, Lich, Azshara, Forest Song, Hippogryph, Sardor Isle, Wolves, Moon and more than one hundred thousand others.

In order to ensure that the effort involved in writing those articles is not wasted, you should link to as many articles as are applicable: it makes Wowpedia a great resource.

Cite your facts
In order to maintain Wowpedia's credibility as the best source of World of Warcraft lore information, it is important that we cite our sources. The more citations an article has, the more credible Wowpedia appears, so do not delay: no fact, sentence, paragraph, in-game observation, or screenshot is too small for a citation!

Be sure to cite each original contribution according to the citation guidelines.

Notability
Are you facing an article with some random tidbits of trivia, no matter how small? Then you should never hesitate and create a new category for it! Surely, one day, someone will want to know about all the judges and divers who ever existed in the rich universe of Warcraft! It's not important if these categories are empty, because they are guaranteed to be filled when new content is someday released.

Content and writing style
The second step toward a consistent writing style is establishing the actual style... of writing... that should be used in articles.

Epic language
If the language used in articles describing lore events is not sufficiently exciting, readers may fall asleep halfway through the article. To avoid this, use language: exciting and unusual verbs (like "terrorizing," "brutalizing," and "gunning for"), nouns ("betrayal", "vendetta", "war zone", "ambush"), and adjectives ("insurrectionist", "renegade") all contribute to making boring lore more exciting, and prevent readers from accidentally falling asleep.

If you're not confident in your ability to write colorfully, try writing as you normally would, and then change every 10th word to a synonym that sounds more exciting (use a thesaurus for best results). It'll probably be okay.

No detail or cameo is too small to mention
When articles are written in language, readers simply cannot get enough of our quality content. To accommodate their wishes, we must include every minute detail from every possible source of information in our articles. Our articles on various Warcraft novels are renowned for their completeness: we strive to list every character involved in each novel, no matter how minor their role, and even go an extra mile by providing a list of all characters that are simply mentioned (like Archimonde was in Stormrage).

Did you just read that Varian Wrynn appeared to Baine Bloodhoof in a Emerald Nightmare-fueled vision, looking grim and sneezed at the tauren twice? This exciting bit of information should be mentioned in all three articles (and make sure that both characters are listed on Stormrage!). Remember to use a section with a source tag to ensure that readers know what novel they should buy for additional details.

Did you just find out that a character is involved in some exciting new lore source? Create a new section on that character's biography immediately with nothing but a Stub/Lore tag for content: someone will surely write the rest of the section now that you've done the hard part and established that the information exists. Having a stub section also keeps our readers hooked: they just know that new and exciting information will be appearing in the article any day now.

"However"
The quality of an article can reliably be measured by counting the number of times the word "however" appears in it. To improve your however-score, remember that however can appear in many places, including at start of sentences describing the outcome of any event: "However, Thrall told Jaina not to kill every orc in Orgrimmar", or after a between every subject and verb pair ("Jaina, however, disagreed.").

The table below illustrates the expected number of times however should appear in major articles on Wowpedia:

Everything is a war
Every event in World of Warcraft which involves both the Horde and the Alliance is a war, a civil war, or, at the very least, a battle (per the language guidelines, wars are better than battles). For inspiration, check out the various wars we already recognize:
 * First War
 * Second War
 * Third War
 * Alliance-Horde war
 * War for the Frozen Throne
 * Invasion of Outland
 * War against the Lich King
 * War against the Scourge
 * War Against the Nightmare
 * War against the Zandalari
 * War against Deathwing

The conflict infobox is very fancy, so it is important to fit any event into the war narrative; if the lore sources do not provide some of the information required by the infobox, extrapolate generously so as not to cast doubt on the benefits of using the infobox. If this ever seems absurd, remember that the primary topic of the wiki is, after all, WARcraft, so everything in it is probably somehow related to a war. We just have to find the right name for it.

Reconciling different points of view
While following the advice on the use of colorful language, you may occasionally be challenged by other editors who believe your reader-friendly descriptions of events are violating the neutral point of view policy. You should of course accommodate those concerns by incorporating additional details that support your point of view but sound incontrovertible (by selectively paraphrasing NPC quotes). For an example, consider the following sentence, which masterfully combines many topics with subtle call-outs to real NPC interactions:
 * When Archmage Aethas refused the declaration and declared Dalaran's status as the Sunreavers' city too, Jaina freezes him, then imprisons him in the Violet Citadel and begins a purge of those unwilling to surrender, an act that spurred the Sunreavers (bereft of leadership without Aethas) into confusion, surrender, or revolt.

Remember that you can revert other editors and question their personal integrity in edit summaries. As a method of last resort, try to find wordings that sound equally unappealing to both sides of the argument on the article's talk page — nobody can dispute that that is truly neutral.

Article management tags
When you see anything that you dislike in a page, feel free to add some generic article management tags to it instead of fixing things yourself, and make sure not to describe exactly what you were bothered to begin with! The person who (four years from now) will take a look at the Things to do and see a page tagged with Move, Merge, Ood, Not fair use, Source needed, Cleanup and Accuracy will know exactly how to handle this situation!

Speculation
When in doubt, anything not specifically written in a easy-to-copy format like quests or World of Warcraft: Chronicle books is to be discarded down to a Speculation section or better yet, deleted entirely. Since you can't copy-paste World of Warcraft zone themselves to Wowpedia, context such as the clothes worn by mobs and the way they interact with their environment is to be ignored entirely. For example, two NPCs of the same race and having the same family name next to each other in a store should never be considered relatives (or even worse, husband and wife) outside of a buried Relatives speculation section.

Red links
When trying to write a lore piece, make sure to link to non-existing articles that you intend to maybe write down someday, especially with obscure and confusing names that you made up on the spot, like "Could war" and "Battle of the highest mountain on Argus"!