Manual of Style rewrite

Wiki Discussion
1

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.

You can view the proposed draft here.

Changes

  1. 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.
  2. The manual is now split into 7 pages, instead of all being on a single page.
  3. 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.
  4. @Jacky720's old dialogue formatting standards, and @DubstepDude1's de-facto dialogue formatting standards, have finally been written into the manual.
  5. Language guidelines now come with examples of good and bad language.
  6. There is a new guide on content verifiability, which more explicitly clarifies which sources are reliable and how to verify them.
  7. 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.
  8. There is a new file quality standard, and I attempted to make the file naming standards clearer.
  9. Guidelines on pronouns have been clarified, and the result of this vote has been incorporated into the standard.
  10. 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.
  11. Oxford comma is now preferred by the standard, as it has been the de-facto standard for years now.
  12. Grammatical contractions are now explicitly discouraged in the standard.
  13. 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.

3

https://deltarune.wiki/w/User:KockaAdmiralac/Formatting#Dialogue

1195×720 179 KB

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.

4

For all readers: here's the new duplicate links policy.

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:

  1. 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)
  2. 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.
  3. Finally, the last paragraph of the lead section of the main MoS page seems cut off.

  1. 142382, 142383, 142385, 142386 ↩︎

5

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!

6

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).

7

Yes. They're much better now.

9

I have the proposal up now, so feel free to take a look.

10

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.

11

This is a slightly minor thing, but with multiple Chinese-coded characters and allusions coming up on the wiki, I want to propose a few MoS things to help be specific and precise with how these are described.

This is not to single anyone out, but the Shi page made a couple of very common mistakes.

https://deltarune.wiki/index.php?title=Shi&diff=185897&oldid=185888

Specifically:

  • It used "Chinese" without qualifying which topolect, which is a no-no.
  • It says "kanji and hanzi" which are the same concept pronounced differently.

Guei also had some mistakes but at least one was my fault because I suck and @EvieMaybe rules:

https://deltarune.wiki/index.php?title=Guei&diff=185890&oldid=185883

Specifically:

  • Traditional Chinese is a script, not a language, so it cannot be "spoken," only written. Simplified Chinese is its sister script, used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia.

So I think for future pages, I think adding some Chinese-related language information to the Manual of Style can be useful as a "hey. go here. u do not need to go to a really long wikipedia page to know the basics of handling this stuff." thing.

So firstly, referring to "kanji and hanzi" does not actually mean anything. It is the "Han script," that is, "Chinese characters," "sinoglyphs," "kanji," "hanzi," "hannom," "hanja," and so on, all these terms mean the same thing: 漢字. The closest you could get to kanji as a distinct thing would be kana, the few Japan-made glyphs for national concepts, and/or shinjitai 新字體, their character simplification scheme, but these are still part of the same script and even get imported into pan-Asian contexts. Kanji makes sense to be used as the term in a Japanese context, and Hanzi makes sense in a Chinese context. In a pan-Asian context, "Chinese characters," the "Han script," and "Sinoglyphs" are commonly used. I like the "Han script" as it avoids any national/political claim, but it does still associate the script with a specific ethnicity, which isn't desirable either, especially when it isn't only a Han Chinese concept.

Secondly, there is no "Chinese" language: Linguistically speaking, it is a family of topolects. Most of the time, where "Chinese" is said, it actually refers to Mandarin Chinese, which is the lingua franca used in mainland China, Taiwan, and Macau. Not qualifying this can be confusing, especially when Cantonese, Hokkien, and Shanghainese into the mix (and Cantonese is mentioned on the Guei page!). Mandarin is a suitable baseline given Guei and Shi's names come from Mandarin, and Toby Fox is documented speaking it. There is a bit of a controversy in China over topolect erasure and Han chauvinism, and it is best to not accidentally fall into that.

Next, there is no "spoken" Simplified and Traditional Chinese; these are basically two fonts. Traditional Chinese is the form used in-game with Guei, so whenever Chinese is written on a page, I would encourage using Traditional Chinese to be consistent with that. I'd say having Simplified Chinese in brackets, page notes, or something, is neat for inclusivity, though it can make pages a bit more difficult to read if it's all in a paragraph.

Finally, I would also advise always including characters next to romanised Mandarin/Cantonese/etc as these languages are filled with homophones and it is not always easy for a speaker to read without characters.

To summarise, I think there should be these four points in the MoS:

  • Say "kanji" in a Japanese context, "hanzi" in a Chinese context, and "Chinese/Han characters" in a pan-Asian context.
    • Yes: Shi resembles x and y hanzi...
    • No: Shi resembles hanzi and kanji...
  • Give pronunciations in Mandarin Chinese first, with "Mandarin Chinese:" preceding it.
    • Yes: Mandarin Chinese: shi...
    • No: Chinese: shi...
  • Use Traditional Chinese by default when writing Chinese. Simplified Chinese should only be included when it is relevant, does not impede reading, and is kept in brackets.
    • Yes: nǐ xǐhuān guǐ ma 你喜歡鬼嗎 (你喜欢鬼吗)
    • Yes: nǐ xǐhuān guǐ ma 你喜歡(欢)鬼嗎(吗)
    • No: 你喜欢鬼吗
  • Always include characters next to romanised Mandarin, Cantonese, and vice versa. Romanisation should go first.
    • Yes: nǐ xǐhuān guǐ ma 你喜歡鬼媽
    • No: 你喜歡鬼媽

I think including this would be useful so people know what they're doing and can educate themselves without looking at an extremely long Wikipedia article.