All The Tropes:Style Guide: Difference between revisions

 

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 ===

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, 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]].

Potholing ''part'' of a word is an accessibility sin, especially if different parts of the same word are potholed to different links. Not only is it difficult for somebody with less-than-perfect motor control to select a small target link in the middle of other links, it looks bad in the default wiki interface because the wiki flags external links. Multiple external links in a single word can make the word [https://www.example.com un][https://www.example.org read][https://www.example.net a][https://www.example.com ble], so don't do it.

 

 

== Internal Links (Wicks) ==

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>

 

 

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.

 

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.

 

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].

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!)

 

 

== Alphabetization ==

|This is who said it|This is the work he said it in.}}

 

 

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.

 

 

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:

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:

 

 

 

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 {{tl|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 <nowiki>{{'}}</nowiki> and the wiki won't know it's there and won't give you the wrong font.

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.

 

 

 

== See Also ==