Our Manual of Style (UT/DR) has grown large and unwieldy. The organization that made sense back in 2016 now sort of hinders our ability to effectively communicate and change standards, so I've taken it upon myself, with help from @Link, to rewrite the manual into more digestible pieces, incorporating what have become de-facto standards that we just never wrote down before.
Undertale and Deltarune Wiki are to use the same manual of style. The new manual will be located on Undertale Wiki, but will apply to both wikis.
The manual is now split into 7 pages, instead of all being on a single page.
This and this discussion, and a couple months of Discord discussion around them, have been incorporated into the standard. The duplicate links policy is probably the single biggest change from previous status quo, so make sure to read through it and discuss if you don't agree.
@Jacky720's old dialogue formatting standards, and @DubstepDude1's de-facto dialogue formatting standards, have finally been written into the manual.
Language guidelines now come with examples of good and bad language.
There is a new guide on content verifiability, which more explicitly clarifies which sources are reliable and how to verify them.
The page organization guide has been largely moved into the Layout manual, and concerns itself solely with article content now (rather than templates and categories). Layout guides from Undertale and Deltarune Wiki have been merged, and new sections such as Speech pattern and Map have been added.
There is a new file quality standard, and I attempted to make the file naming standards clearer.
Guidelines on pronouns have been clarified, and the result of this vote has been incorporated into the standard.
Point about article determiners for locations and characters with proper-noun names has been added, after @Shadow's work on standardizing these across Deltarune Wiki articles.
Oxford comma is now preferred by the standard, as it has been the de-facto standard for years now.
Grammatical contractions are now explicitly discouraged in the standard.
SnorlaxMonster's image captions proposal on ending punctuation has been written into the standard, after work by HylianAngel and others to standardize this on Deltarune Wiki.
I might be forgetting some of the changes we did, so please tell me if you notice something else changed.
Further steps
Please take time to read through the new manual and give feedback on anything that seems off! I'd like to roll out the new Manual of Style before Chapter 5 releases, which is pretty soon.
The table makes it hard to see where the line breaks are, and it completely erases the bullet points in the second example. It might be better to put each example one after the other without a table.
Are we planning to roll this out with a bot or something? Because we have a total of 1,281 articles across the Undertale and Deltarune Wikis, and less than 48 hours (!!!) until Chapter 5 releases.
I had a few minor corrections to the manual that I just made myself,[1] but I found a few things that need more input:
In the item pages section of the Layout manual, it lists a "Locations" header, but doesn't have it in the numbered list sectioning guide (would've added it myself, but I don't know exactly where it goes)
The Categories manual seems to have been written before the decision to merge UTW and DRW's manuals, and so has some specific-to-DRW text.
Finally, the last paragraph of the lead section of the main MoS page seems cut off.
I moved them out of a table now. Do you think the examples are now clearer?
I mostly wanted to get this out so we can apply it going forward. We can have a separate project after the dust settles to get all the wiki pages consistent with the manual changes. It's not that important to have all the pages in order for the release, but it's good to have these out so we won't have to re-change everything after we've added the Chapter 5 content.
This one was a change on Undertale Wiki that we apparently haven't rolled out to Deltarune Wiki yet (example). I added it for now, though @F-sharp is working on a new item page formatting proposal so these sections might generally change in the future.
Which text? I finished it a couple hours ago so maybe I just forgot something. If it's the category name, I specifically used Category:{{SITENAME}} for it so it becomes the right category on Undertale Wiki.
Oops, finished it now. Thanks for the corrections!
Yeah, it was just the category name (although if the manual is located on just UTW and not DRW, DRW editors will be confused at why it doesn't mention Category:Deltarune Wiki at all).
I've been so busy helping merge the current Manual of Style to the reworked one, but hopefully it's clearer for everyone to read. Still trying to iron it out! Along with editing other articles.. I probably should hold back on the latter for now.
Thanks to F-sharp for adding the ACT card descriptions, and thanks to @Otval12345 for implementing the convenience links for Relationships! I've added a description mentioning the template very recently.
