User:BadCatMan/Manual of Style

To help users write quality articles and to promote a consistent style across the wiki, this Manual of Style is a style guide offering a variety of helpful tips for writing, formatting, and organization of articles on the Forgotten Realms Wiki.

These guidelines are based on standard wiki style and on habits developed by FRW editors, designed to the suit the Forgotten Realms setting and the wiki's goals. Some are set by our Policies, while others may not be mandatory but are commonly used. An editor might not use some of these on an article, but should be aware that another editor will eventually apply it.

See Wikipedia's Manual of Style for more detailed guidelines.

But some articles…
No, some existing articles don't employ these styles. These articles were mostly written before these policies and habits were developed or enforced. Others slipped through the net later. That does not mean any bad habits they show are okay. We just have quite a backlog to get through. The editors here hope to eventually bring all these articles up to a consistent style and good quality. If you see any, try fixing it up yourself.

In-universe
An in-universe article is one about the fictional lore of the Forgotten Realms or another setting, and the Dungeons & Dragons game. A common fan-term for this is "fluff" (as opposed to the "crunch" of rules and statistics; see Crunch, below, for how to handle this). This includes characters, creatures, places and areas, events and history, spells, items, and even classes. An in-universe article shouldn't mention crunch, novels, sourcebooks, and so on. These are obtrusive; coming across these breaks the reader's suspension of disbelief, reminding them that they are not reading about a world, but about a book or game. See Help:Citing sources for how to cite a novel in an unobtrusive way, through footnoted referenced.

Perspective
Thus, you should write articles from an in-universe perspective or point-of-view (POV) of someone in the setting. That person can't see the book something happened in, they can't see the game rules, or the level of a character. So don't mention these things. That person, being essentially the reader, is otherwise omniscient, however; they know everything else that went on. But, because of our past tense policy, below, all these things occurred in the past. If it helps, consider yourself as a sage living centuries in the future of the setting, after everything has changed, collecting and compiling all these records of the past.

That said, you should also write from the third-person point-of-view (POV). There's no need to go into character with a first-person POV ("I saw this") or address the reader or player with a second-person POV ("You see this").

Tense
Owing to our Remove Wiki from Timeline policy, all in-universe articles must be written in past tense. So, not "Elminster slays the dragon and flies to Cormyr" (present tense), but "Elminster slayed the dragon and flew to Cormyr" (past tense). In the first case, both events seem to happen at once, which doesn't make sense. Some users employ an odd conditional-future tense with 'would', as in "Elminster would slay the dragon and would fly to Cormyr" but this sounds even stranger, suggesting Elminster only planned these things, but did not necessarily do them. Only the past tense makes it clear that these things actually happened in the story: "Elminster slayed the dragon then flew to Cormyr" is clearest and simplest. Saying "Ravens Bluff was a city in the Vast" does not mean it has been destroyed in the latest edition, only that it was a city then and was a city up to when we last heard of it.

As an exception, the present tense is used in articles about individual years, following the custom of chronologies presented in the sourcebooks and on Wikipedia. For example, from -286 DR, "The Xothol arcane college is closed." and "Wulgreth of Netheril settles in the ruins of Karse."

The present tense can also be used when referring to real-world topics, e.g., "the rapier is a sword with a thin pointed blade", as this is a real item currently existing in our world. It can also be used when information is unknown, e.g., "The outcome of this battle is unknown", meaning it is unknown to the article writer or reader, but may be known to characters in the setting. This should be used with discretion. The main body of the article and in-universe lore should still be in past tense.

Other tenses can still be used for more complex events: "Elminster would have slayed the dragon, but it was immune to his magic." (a conditional future tense for events that were planned), "Smuggling had been going until 1375 DR when paladins put a stop to it." (the past perfect continuous tense, for events that took place for some period of time until some point in the past).