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All The Tropes:Style Guide: Difference between revisions
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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 Example]]s are subject to deletion. Work pages with nothing but Zero Context Examples are themselves subject to deletion if no one chooses to rescue them.<ref>Assuming we have time. Usually they just get tagged with {{tl|trope list needs context}}, which puts them onto [[:Category:Trope list needs context|this "cleanup" list]].</ref> 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 [[All The Tropes:How to Alphabetize Things|How to Alphabetize Things]].
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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.<ref>No, that is not a challenge.</ref>
The only real style requirements exist for work names. Wherever possible, the first occurrence of a work name in an example or a description 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.
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Sometimes you might think it's necessary (or more attractive) to use a pothole with a work name. For instance, the ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'' novels are all described on subpages under [[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]], like ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish]]''; potholing that link to ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish|So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish]]'' just looks better. Go ahead and do that. Just be careful not to misspell or otherwise mangle the work name in the pothole. And once more, if you're not sure how to code a pothole, the markup is <code><nowiki>[[link|pothole text]]</nowiki></code> -- the link, a vertical bar, and then the text you want to have go to that link.
While you can pothole a plural version of a page name, you don't need to. Both <code><nowiki>[[Gasshole|Gassholes]]</nowiki></code> and <code><nowiki>[[Gasshole]]s</nowiki></code> create the link [[Gasshole]]s, and the shorter version is easier to read in the source editor.
Again, [[Pothole]]s are good, while [[sinkhole]]s 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 [[It Gets Worse|rid]][[From Bad to Worse|icul]][[It Got Worse|ous.]] It's also an [http://blogaccessibility.com/sin-2-of-inaccessible-blogs-using-consecutive-one-worded-links/ accessibility sin].
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