All The Tropes:Style Guide

This page documents the house style for All The Tropes. If you have a question about how to write and present information, you should find answers here.

These rules aren't perfect, nor do they cover all situations. As such, these aren't official policy, but more like guidelines. However, like all style guides, it's a good idea to know the rules before you break them.

Also, we inherited a lot of badly-formatted pages from TV Tropes. It has been, and will continue to be, the work of years to find and fix them all, and we're nowhere near done yet. Following the guidelines below will help the wiki by not adding to the workload.

tl;dr:

There is no "tl;dr" -- if you've been pointed at this page, read all of it. If you've been directed here by a staff member and continue to make these mistakes, expect a mod to temporarily remove the distraction of editing for you so you have the time to read it.

The Basics
All The Tropes aims to present a casual but reliable image. Please write in third person, without using Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness or being formal. (This is a wiki, not a classroom.)

Short paragraphs are good for showing a casual style. If people have to read through a Wall of Text, most of them will give up partway through. "Casual" includes knowing when to give people a chance to catch their breath.

The first time you mention the name of the work, trope, or creator on the page, please markup the name in boldface. Select the text and click or tap the "B" character at the top of the editing window.

Any time you mention the name of a work - any work - please highlight the work name. If it's a book, movie, TV show, or record album, please markup the name in italics - select the text and click or tap the "I" character at the top of the editing window. If it's some other type of work, please surround it in double-quotes (the " character) if you're using American English or single-quotes (the ' character) if you're using British English. This can (and should, please) be combined with the boldface markup that should be used the first time a work page's title is mentioned on the page. See "Italics, Boldface, and Other Emphasis" below for more on this.

Please also use italics, not all-caps, for emphasis. Since the days of UseNet, all-caps has meant "shouting" on the 'net, and most people avoid shouting in casual conversation.

Adding Examples to Tropes
When you add an example to a trope page, take care to put it in the proper section. Don't, for example, add an item for a film to an example for the book that inspired it just because they are related works. Put the new example under "Film" (and make sure it links to the page for that film, and not the book or a disambiguation page).

If there isn't a section for the particular kind of media your example comes from, feel free to add it! (We have a standard list of media types we're trying to make sure is used everywhere, consult it if you need help.) Oh, and if you do add a new section, do make sure it's in proper alphabetical order vis-à-vis the other sections on the page. ("Other Media" and "Real Life" go at the end of the list, however, out of alphabetical order. Some tropes may have a "General" or "Meta" section; this will go at the top before the other sections.)

If your example is an elaboration or another instance of the trope in a work that already has an entry in an existing section, that's something that sometimes gets called a "subexample" around here. Feel free to add it as a secondary bullet point under the "main" example.

If you're adding an entirely new example to an existing section, put it at the end of the section. (This is to make it easier for readers to find new material.) If you just drop it in at the top (or worse, at random in the middle for no good reason), an admin will probably move it to the end of the section within a day or so, so it'll end up there anyway, so why not start with it in the right place?

Some pages, by their nature, do not have sections -- either they are tropes specific to a particular medium, or they are medium-specific subpages of example-overloaded tropes. In these cases, add your example to the bottom of the page. (Yes, we know that many of these are alphabetized; they came that way from TV Tropes. However, we feel that ease of finding new entries outweighs the aesthetic value of an alphabetized page.)

Make sure your example is properly marked up -- the work name should be a link and emphasized as is proper for the kind of work it is (see the other sections on this page for what you need to do if you don't already know). Do make sure you're linking to the right page, not a redirect, a disambiguation page, or a page for a different version of the work (or a different work entirely that has the same name). Don't bury the link to the work in a pothole on a character name or phrase that will not be obvious to the casual reader or viewer who might not know the work, or which will fall out of common knowledge in five or ten years.

For more information on how to write a good example, see How to Write An Example.

Adding Tropes to Works
The trope lists on a work page (or any of its subpages) are a little more strutured than examples on trope pages. Where an example can take almost any form based on how the troper wants to describe the example, trope entries always use the same format:



Let's take this one part at a time.

First, there's an asterisk. This creates the bullet point that sets the new trope off from its neighbors. It's followed by a space to improve the readability of the page source.

Second, the trope name, surrounded by double square brackets. The brackets turn the name into a link as noted elsewhere. If when you save the page this is a Red Link, you've done something wrong -- either you've used a trope that doesn't exist on this site, you misspelled something, or you got the capitalization wrong. We have a hints system that pops up a progressive list of possible links for you in the upper right corner of the edit window; make use of that to avoid problems. It's also a good idea to make sure the link you're using is the actual name of the trope you want, and not a redirect, a disambiguation page, or a work. (We have more than a few works whose titles sound like trope names; every once in a while a mod has to remove a trope entry that points to one of them.)

Immediately after the trope link is a colon (":"). Don't forget it, or you may get a little note from a mod or another user who's had to go in and add them to your work. Don't use dashes or long dashes or anything else here. And it, too, gets followed by a space -- that's a general punctuation rule, not just for readability here.

Finally, the explanation of how the trope applies to the work. This is mandatory. Zero Context Examples are subject to deletion. Work pages with nothing but Zero Context Examples are themselves subject to deletion if no one chooses to rescue them. One of the most valid criticisms of troping is that what we do is nothing but mindless cataloguing. If you don't explain how the trope functions (and why) in this work, then you're confirming that criticism. Put thought into writing a description that not only explains where in a work the trope is found, but how it works as a part of the story, and what makes it important.

Finally, your trope should be inserted in proper alphabetical order. Most of the time this should be obvious if you're a frequent user of the Latin alphabet, but there are edge situations and unclear cases. If you need help, see "Alphabetization", below, or our page How to Alphabetize Things.

And if you think we're belaboring things here by going into absurd levels of detail... well, no, we're not. Over the years we have had to clean up after literally hundreds of users who couldn't even look at the other trope entries on a page to see how things were done, and just dumped in plain text apparently thinking everything else would be done for them by magic -- or because they thought the Wiki Magic exists to save them the trouble. Don't be like them.

Capitalization
Capitalization of trope names follows our style of titlecase:
 * Capitalize all major words, and both words in hyphenated compounds.
 * Always capitalize the first word of a title, and any word after a colon or dash.
 * Conjunctions (and, but, or, nor), articles (a, an, the), and short prepositions (on, in, to, by, for, at, of, as, etc.) should be lowercased.
 * Longer prepositions (four or more letters) should be capitalized (with, from, whereas, etc.).

Capitalization of page titles for works should match the original marketing as nearly as possible -- and preferably the English-language marketing. (If you're uncertain, copying the page name Wikipedia uses is usually safe, plus it will make the Wikipedia tab found in the "work" and "creator" page templates work perfectly.)

Language
If the original language does not use the Latin alphabet (A-Z), the English-language marketing name should be used instead. If there is no established marketing name, use the name Wikipedia uses. Only if there is no English-language marketing name and Wikipedia does not already have a page for the work should the title be transliterated to the English equivalent. (This is an English-language wiki; pages about works with English-language marketing names should use the English-language names for the convenience of casual readers.) For example, we use the English title Journey to the West, not the original Chinese title 西遊記. However, feel free to create a redirect for the name of the work in its native language to the name of the work in English.

Japanese text, which is littered around this site, has a few more helpful rules for transliterations of titles.
 * Lowercase mid-sentence particles (ga, wa, no) and write them as separate words.
 * For sentence ending particles (yo, zo, ze, wa), either agglutinate them to the previous word (no space), or capitalize.
 * Honorifics should be lowercase, and be joined to their noun with a hyphen (e.g. Sakura-chan).
 * Given a choice, please use Hepburn romanization. All The Tropes is not a scholarly-linguistics site, so we prefer to use the romanization system that "sounds like" the Japanese words (e.g. "bimbogami", not "bimbokami".)

Page boilerplate
We have a large selection of boilerplates that you should use to make a new page look like other pages on All The Tropes.

Typically, you'll find something appropriate in the dropdown menu that appears above the edit window when you create a page, or it will preload when you select something from the Add Page menu. But if that doesn't work, you'll find something on All The Tropes:Creating a Page by Hand that you can use to do things the hard way.

Internal Links (Wicks)
Again, for those unfamiliar with MediaWiki, some notes on markup. Most importantly MediaWiki does not use CamelCase for its page names, and thus for its links. MediaWiki page names allow spaces, almost all punctuation, and non-English characters -- and to turn a page name into a link, just put it as-is in double square brackets ( and  ) when using the source editor. If you want to add a pothole or link text, you separate it from the link itself with a vertical bar ("|"). So, for instance, a link to the classic British comedy series 'Allo 'Allo! would be coded. But if you wanted to pothole it to the text "that classic British series", you would code it like so:, which produces "that classic British series".

That said, when it comes to links to other pages on the wiki, the guidelines are a little different -- and for the most part, looser, mainly because you can't make an internal link quite as confusing or unintelligible as an external link can be without really working at it.

The only real style requirements exist for work names. Wherever possible, a work name should also be a link. This requires that you use the name of a work as it appears on the work page, matching punctuation and capitalization exactly. That's usually not to hard to determine -- if you don't already know it off the top of your head, you can use the wiki's search function to find it. (However, always click through a search result. You may have found a disambiguation or franchise page or a redirect and not the actual work page; clicking through will make sure you get to the right name, eventually.)

Once you have the right name, insert it into your edit with the appropriate markup. Right off the bat, of course, it should be in link markup, as described above. Of course, we don't have a page for every existing work on the wiki. But even if there isn't a page for it here, we still want the work name to be a link -- it might inspire another troper to write that page. So even if you can't find a page, mark up the work name as a link anyway.

Most work names should then be put italics markup (two single quotes/apostrophes before and after the link markup). There are exceptions to this -- short stories, individual songs, and other short-format works get double quotes instead of italics -- but in general italics are a safe choice.

Sometimes you might think it's necessary (or more attractive) to use a pothole with a work name. For instance, the Harry Potter novels are all described on subpages under Harry Potter, like Harry Potter/Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone; potholing that link to Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone just looks better. Go ahead and do that. Just be careful not to misspell or otherwise mangle the work name in the pothole. And if you're not sure how to code a pothole, the markup is  -- the link, a vertical bar, and then the text you want to have go to that link.

Again, Potholes are good, while sinkholes are bad. Potholes and Sinkholes where different parts of the same word link to different pages are horrid - there's no way for a casual reader to know (or even suspect) that there's more than one link in the word. Unless you happen to take advantage of the wiki's color-coded internal links, but then it looks ridiculous. It's also an accessibility sin.

In short, your work links should generally look like

when you're typing them into the source editor.

Section Headers
MediaWiki is capable of displaying five levels of headers, analogous to HTML's "H2" through "H6". (The equivalent to H1 is reserved for page titles.) To mark text as a section header of a given level, put that many equals signs in a row before and after the text, with a single space before and after the header text. Also, there should be nothing else on a line that has header text.

The headers are designed to be "nested"; that is, an H2 should come before the H3s that are subsets of the same topic, an H3 should come before the H4s that are subsets of the same subtopic, and so on. While you won't break the wiki by ignoring this, not nesting the headers as expected does nasty things to some screen-reader software and thus limits how much of the wiki blind people can access. Besides, it looks ugly. (Due to a bug in our import software back in 2013, a lot of pages were brought in with their header levels inverted. Almost all of them have been fixed over the ensuing years, but occasionally one pops up that we missed (especially in Characters subpages); if you come across one of these, please fix it!)

Since all headers on a page appear in that page's table of contents, section headers should not be used as a replacement for boldface. (Yes, we know we have hundreds if not thousands of pages, especially Characters subpages, where they are used this way; these pages were inherited from TV Tropes. If you see a page like this, please fix it!)

A special note on the "References" and "Notes" headers: We are not Wikipedia. If we wanted to look like Wikipedia, we would have added the References header to the "reflist" template years ago. Don't add " == References == " or " == Notes == " to any of our Trope, Work, or Creator pages or their subpages.

Alphabetization
We follow standard alphabetization rules when sorting trope lists into alphabetical order. For our purposes, these boil down to:


 * The space character counts, and comes before everything else when it matters. That means "any time" sorts before "anybody".
 * Ignore punctuation at the start of the list item. "Alone with Prisoner" Ploy will sort between Alien Abduction and Alpha Bitch.
 * Punctuation and other symbols (#, @, etc.) that appear after the first character come after the space but before numerals.
 * Numerals (0-9) come after symbols and before letters.
 * It should go without saying, but the order is not case-sensitive. "AA" comes before "ab"; "aa" comes before "AB".
 * Finally, ignore leading articles ("a", "an" and "the"). This means The Cape (trope) will sort between Can't Argue with Elves and Car Bomb.

If you want more detail, see our page on How to Alphabetize Things.

Hatnotes
Readers familiar with Wikipedia have probably seen at least one "hatnote" there - a line of text (usually in italics) at the top of a page that points out other pages with similar names as a quick disambiguation method. Unlike Wikipedia, we treat all cases of disambiguation equally; we do not select specific works or tropes as the "primary topic" (AKA the "main" page) for a given name and use hatnotes to redirect to alternatives.

Although All The Tropes does not use Wikipedia-style hatnotes, we do sometimes incorporate similar linking to alternate page choices in the main text of an article, usually just before the trope or example list, in a form like "If you're looking for the video game of the same name, go here" or the infamous "Not to be confused with". Be careful with the latter usage, though, because it is often employed for humorous purposes. You may sometimes find these links referred to as "beltnotes" (because they are found midway between hatnotes and footnotes).

For more information about hatnotes, please see our page on Creating Disambiguation Pages.

Italics, Boldface, and Other Emphasis
When writing text for a wiki page, do not use ALL CAPITAL LETTERS for emphasis. This may be a necessity in plain text files or email, but the wiki has full font support like any other web page. Repeating what we said above in "The Basics": Since the days of UseNet, all-caps has meant "shouting" on the 'net. Please don't shout at our readers.

Similarly, we are not email. Do not use *asterisks* to emphasize text, either.

Any kind of emphasis you want to make should default to mixed or lower case in italics. Italics markup, as noted elsewhere on this page, is accomplished with two single quotes/apostrophes before and after the text to be emphasized.

Also, please don't use boldface (generated with three single quotes) for emphasis. Bold text should be reserved for emphasis within block-quotes that are already in italics and for minor subheads in the main text. Also, the first time a work page mentions the work's name in its text, the name should be marked up in bold and italics (unless it's a short story or a single song, in which case it should be in boldface and quotes). There are almost no other cases when boldface is an appropriate style choice, and boldface plus italics should never be used for emphasis because it's nearly as bad as ALL CAPS.

There are situations where you will want to put an apostrophe immediately after a word in italics, in order to indicate a possessive. This puts three apostrophes in a row, which is the markup for boldface text. In order to prevent the three apostrophes from being treated as boldface markup, put the third apostrophe in double braces, like so: '. (The "nowiki" markup used on other wikis should not be used on All The Tropes as a matter of wiki style.) We have become aware that the visual editor does not follow the wiki's style in this case.

Finally, do not put the trope links in a work's trope list in italics or bold. If a trope needs special attention brought to it, do it with the description.

For more information on how to mark up text on a page (as opposed to when or why), see Help:Formatting.

Abbreviations, Ampersands, etc.
In general, do not abbreviate, and do not use ampersand (&) in place of "and".

Exceptions:
 * The work name uses an abbreviation or an ampersand.
 * "Live-Action TV" for "Live-Action Television" in headers.

Not everyone is going to know what you think is an "obvious" abbreviation or acronym. (For example, there are hundreds if not thousands of people who hear "WWW" and don't immediately think of the Wicked Witch of the West.) There have been examples which we inherited from TV Tropes that were so filled with obscure and idiosyncratic abbreviations that they were all but unintelligible, and which took hours of research to decode into something readable. This kind of writing does not serve our core value of communicating clearly. If it's not a common term such as "etc." (et cetera, "and the rest") or "i.e." (id est, "that is"), spell it out clearly. Never assume the reader will know what an abbreviation means.

And don't Pothole an abbreviation to what it means. If you can be bothered to code a potholed link, use the name of the page you're linking to, not an abbreviation.

In all cases if the title of a work employs a usage that conflicts with these style rules (for instance, Dungeons & Dragons), we do not correct the title.

Numbers and Numerals
We follow the Chicago Manual of Style when it comes to numerals and numbers. The default Chicago style for numbers one through one hundred is to spell them out. Use numerals for 101 and larger numbers. Also use numerals for years, times and percentages.

When writing ordinal numerals, do not abbreviate: "first", not "1st"; "second", not "2nd".

Approximate age ranges and decades are written without apostrophes: "He was in his 30s in the 1980s",  not "He was in his 30's in the 1980's".

Do not use fractions as words -- spell out "half" or "one-half", for example, instead of using "1/2".

However, when referring to seasons or episodes of a show -- "Season 3 of Star Trek: The Original Series", "V2E12 of RWBY" -- numerals should be used.

In all cases if the title of a work employs a usage that conflicts with these style rules (for instance, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, the film 42nd Street, or the manga Ranma ½), we do not correct the title.

Quotes
We encourage top-of-page quotes and the use of quotes as part of examples, and we've settled on a few "standard" ways to format them.

First, for those who haven't looked at the source for a page with a quote, or looked at our markup documentation, we set off a quote with the quote template. A basic quote takes the following form in the source editor:

This results in:

"This is the first line of the quote. This is the second line. This is the third."

- This is who said it

Note that the quote template automatically indents the quote; there's no need to do so yourself with additional markup. Nor do you need to separate the paragraphs (or lines) of the quote with a blank line or an HTML  tag. Also note that the last part of the quote -- called the attribution -- starts with a vertical bar and is on a separate line. This isn't strictly necessary, but it makes multi-line quotes look better. It's also not mandatory -- if your quote has no attribution, you can skip it. Or you can just put in who said it and skip the work. It's flexible.

You can use virtually any markup inside a quote, including internal and external links. Note that each line inside a quote is, in effect, a separate paragraph, separate from the rest even for markup. Any kind of markup which you want to apply to the whole quote -- like putting it all in italics -- will need to be applied to each line separately.

The quote template does have one annoying idiosyncracy -- if the quote you're adding (or its attribution, like a link to YouTube) has an equals sign -- "=" -- in it, that part of the quote will not display, because the wiki will mistake it for a parameter and "eat" it. You need to replace every equals sign in your quote with a special code -- = -- which will not get eaten and will behave like a proper equals sign when it comes to text and links.

That said, we have certain styles we use for different kinds of quotes that we strongly recommend and which will be eventually imposed on your quotes by a mod if you don't do it yourself. These are:

Dialogue
Dialogue quotes look like a bit of film or stage script, simply displaying who is speaking and what they said (and sometimes a little bit of relevant "stage directions"). The speakers' names are put in bold, emphasis in italics, and everything else is left alone:

"One: I'm the first speaker.  Two: And I am the second."

Don't put quotation marks around the lines of dialogue, or put them in italics.

Also! Don't "translate" prose into dialogue format by stripping out everything in the passage except what people said. Just quote the whole passage, as described below.

Song Lyrics and Poetry
We like to see lyrics in italics. Put each line on a separate line in the quote -- don't use slashes to delimit lines and put it all in one solid block. Separate verses with a single blank line, nothing else. And because of the line-is-a-paragraph behavior mentioned above, you'll need to start each line with italics markup. A lyric quote should look like:

"Roses are red, Violets are purple, Don't expect this to rhyme It's just an example.

''Second verse, same as the first. '''Cause I'm too lazy to write more."

The last line demonstrates one other markup issue you'll need to be aware of, although it applies everywhere in the wiki, not just in the quote markup. If you have a word which starts with an apostrophe -- like 'tis, 'cause, 'til -- and you want to put italics markup in front of it, you need to code it in a similar way to the equals sign to keep three single quotes in a row from turning into bold markup. Use ' and the wiki won't know it's there and won't give you the wrong font.

Block Quotes
These are passages copied directly from a text work, and retaining their general layout. In general -- and especially when they're the top-of-page quote for a page -- we want to see them in italics. As before that means marking each line individually. And anywhere in the quote there was already italics needs to be turned into bold.

Further advice: Don't linewrap text manually -- one line = one paragraph, as noted above. Don't put blank lines between the paragraphs. If you enter the text properly, it'll space itself out automatically. Here's a little "Lorem ipsum" to show you what it should look like:

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."