In Deltarune, most item names are formatted with CamelCase and/or shortened words in the inventory (like SpinCake instead of Spin Cake, and PrincessRBN instead of Princess Ribbon). For most items, the inventory formatting is the only one that the game uses. But some items are formatted with proper casing and without shortened words in dialogue or narration (like ShadowMantle as Shadow Mantle, and DD-Burger as Double-Dark-Burger).
The items that only have the inventory formatting should be formatted as such on the wiki. But what about the items that have a longer/proper-cased alternative in the game? When do we use the alternative formatting, as opposed to the inventory formatting? I can think of the following rules:
Always use the inventory formatting: The inventory formatting is the only one that every item has without fail. We could use that across the wiki indiscriminately.
Always use the longer/proper-cased formatting when one is available: Most of the time, the longer/proper-cased formatting is the one that people would actually use in a sentence.
Use the formatting that's used the most often by the game: As far as I can tell, the only longer/proper-cased formatting that this rule excludes is the Revive Mint (and the Lancer Cookie, depending on how you count).
Prioritize how it's formatted in spoken dialogue, then narration, then the "[ITEM] was added to your [INVENTORY]" text, then the inventory itself: As far as I can tell, this always uses the longer/proper-cased formatting when one is available.
Prioritize how it's formatted in spoken dialogue, then the "[ITEM] was added to your [INVENTORY]" text, then the inventory itself, then narration: This completely excludes how the narration formats the name, since the item always has an inventory name. This is the rule currently written in the Manual of Style.
(This is approval voting. Select any and all rules you would approve if chosen.)
I would really like to avoid calling the Shadow Mantle "ShadowMantle" given the importance of that item so any option that doesn't do that is fine by me. Nobody calls it the "ShadowMantle", neither the game nor the fanbase.
In other words, we would change a bunch of lore-related articles to refer to the Shadow Mantle as ShadowMantle, when the the item is never called that in the lore. What about Shadow Mantle holder? Would they become the ShadowMantle holder?
Other items aren't quite as ubiquitous, so I could go either way for them.
I want to lean towards excluding dialogue and narration as much as possible just because of how bad "Tobycasing" and "Tobyspelling" can get. Giving some items longer names and others abbreviated ones also creates less uniformity and may confuse readers and new editors (especially if we use a more complicated heirarchy or the "most common name" system--which themselves raise a number of questions).
In relation to Kocka's argument, I would not mind making exemptions to those items that are lore relevant and not talked about primarily in the meta sense as consumable items, but it should only be the exception and not the rule in my opinion.
Well maybe only do that for the item page and like the name, and put other names in the infobox?
And maybe when you like use a link to provide for a another page (ie writing a page on a character in a certain area and having a link to that page of the area) you use the name that is used most often?
There won't be uniformity no matter what we do (unless we bring back conjectural names). There are items in the game that have proper spacing even in the inventory.
I am firmly against making exceptions. We should pick a rule and stick to it.
I closed the poll, because I want to resolve this before Deltarune Chapter 5 comes out tomorrow. Longer/proper-cased when available has won by one vote.
Looks good, although for the DD burger are we adding hyphens? I feel like that might make the page title look a tad odd to casual users...(might being the key word here)
