User:Ryan W/Sandbox/Draft guideline page

 ''Although this page is believed to reflect the present consensus on this wiki, it is still a work in progress. Please feel free to discuss, critique, or challenge any of these guidelines on the talk page.''

The Doom Wiki encourages its contributors to employ common sense while editing, and to resolve differences of opinion by discussing them on talk pages. Occasionally, however, a policy or guideline is recorded to document a longstanding precedent or other large-scale decision. The goal is to make it easier to produce a high-quality encyclopedia.

Guidelines are less strict than policies. Following them is a good idea because it results in more polished articles, but exceptions can sometimes be justified.

Things that may have articles
Before creating a new article, see "Article format", "Article titles", and "Capitalization" below. Almost every new article is far from complete; use the template at the top.

Before starting an article you saw on the list of wanted articles, please check the list of links first. If every link originates from the talk spaces or Central Processing, that means the article has only been discussed in a hypothetical sense, and probably shouldn't be written.

If a game or add-on exists only in source/demo/beta form, but is available to the general public and meets the other criteria below, then it should be included.

Games, gameplay, and walkthroughs
Of course. However, some topics are more prominent than others.

Commercially released titles in the Doom series, or based on the Doom engine, or both, are emphasized most here. They should have one article per game/episode, one article per map, one article per weapon, one article per item/powerup, and one article per enemy. For commercial ports of these games to non-PC platforms (including Doom RPG and the Xbox releases), create subsidiary articles only for topics where the new version differs substantially from the original.

Fan-made games, as well as non-commercial games using the Doom engine, are interesting but less significant. They should have one article per game, and perhaps a walkthrough as well.

If any gameplay-related article becomes bloated due to excessive technical detail, the latter may be moved to its own page (see below).

WADs and other mods
The standard for inclusion is still an open question. This page originally said that any publicly released PWAD could be covered. Some people then questioned the encyclopedic value of including every mediocre-to-godawful entry in the idgames database. Conversely, a few WADs attract a lot of notice from the Doom community even while unreleased.

If a PWAD is judged to be notable, it should have one article per map, plus one summary page for each multi-level file (as with the episodes of the classic series). This also applies to total conversions which are released as IWADs but do not actually alter the engine, such as Freedoom and Chex Quest. Mod-specific weapons, items, and monsters should not have their own articles.

Mods for non-Doom-engine games should be included only if they have something to do with Doom (e.g. Your Path of Destruction).

Editors, source ports
If released. Port-specific weapons, items, and monsters should not have their own articles.

People
The standard for inclusion is still an open question. One proposed set of criteria, from the early days of the Doom Wiki, can be found here. Historically, a conservative approach has usually been taken in order to avoid creating a free hosting service.

Websites
The standard for inclusion is still an open question. One proposed set of criteria can be found here.

LMPs
A demo may have its own article only when considered pioneering or unusually well-known (e.g. 30uv1617).

Technical information, terminology, statistics, and trivia
Among other things, the Doom Wiki intends to be an archival resource for programmers, mappers, and historians of gaming. (As Fredrik has remarked, " [t] hings like List of vanilla maps by size are the very purpose of this wiki...") Such topics are by nature heterogeneous, and we therefore have no rigid criteria for notability. Do not create articles, however, which:
 * duplicate information already presented in other articles;
 * describe an extremely obvious consequence of the information in other articles (e.g., "The Mancubus fireball clipping bug might occur on MAP07: Dead Simple");
 * duplicate information from another site without adding new content; or
 * will never be more than one paragraph long.

Article format

 * For something related to Doom or Doom II in general, it is unnecessary to add "In Doom, ..." at the beginning of the article or name the page "Doom ...". Such modifiers should however always be added for things related to other games (e.g. Strife), including Doom 3. "In XXX..." or something equivalent should also be used for things pertaining to one specific version of Doom (e.g. Ultimate Doom, Final Doom, Shareware Doom, v1.2).
 * Articles about maps which are part of a multi-map WAD should have names of the form  MAP##: Level Name (WAD Name) , as with E1M3: The Gatehouse (Heretic) and MAP31: The Descent (Hell Revealed). A redirect without the WAD name should be made, and the map template used at the top of the article for disambiguation, thus:  (this will automatically put the page into the category corresponding to the map number).  For levels which were also released singly, the map number need not be part of the title, but the template should still be used.
 * Many articles are definitions of things related to the game. If this is the case, start the page with a short one-sentence definition, and give the name in bold. A good example can be found at the start of Shotgun: "The pump-action shotgun is one of the most versatile and useful weapons in the Doom player's arsenal."
 * Add plenty of wikilinks to other articles but do not go overboard. For example, if you are writing about something relating to Heretic, do not turn every reference to Heretic into a link.  Make the first mention a link, but further mentions of Heretic normal text.  The previous two sentences are an example.
 * Reference documents (walkthroughs or long technical articles, for instance) may be exceptions, as these are not necessarily read end to end; use one link per section, not per page.


 * Do not sign your name at the bottom of articles you edit: remember that this is a wiki, and anyone can edit your articles to improve or correct them. Attaching your name is redundant in any case, as the "history" page keeps track of who edited an article and when.
 * Always categorize! It is a good idea to look around Special:Categories before choosing a category, to see which category suits your article best.  You can categorize a page by including  somewhere on the page, where "Your category" is the name of the intended category.  If you think you need to, you may use more than one category tag to classify an article in multiple categories, however keep in mind that most categories are categorized themselves, so adding more than one category can be redundant.  For example, if you create an article on the ammo clip, you would classify it under ammo only, not ammo and items, because ammo is a subcategory of items.
 * If you have an article and a category with the same name, use the template to automatically reference the article from the category.

Style

 * See also: Neutral point of view policy

The Doom Wiki is an encyclopedia; as with a paper encyclopedia, its articles should be written in a consistent style.

Article titles and other proper nouns

 * First priority should be given to names appearing in-game; such are the most readily recognized terms, as players see them continually while they play. Failing that, use names that appear in the manuals or documentation.
 * For more technical subjects, look first at the source code, and then for terms associated to programs by the community (if these are commonplace).
 * Some concepts or gameplay phenomena have no specific "officially licensed" name. In such cases, use the most widespread community appellation. Thing is a good example of this, as a term used by fans to describe sprite related game entities in the Doom games.
 * After deciding on the most suitable title for an article, include secondary names in the introductory section, such as colloquial names the community has adopted or names drawn from other products in the franchise. Always specify the source of such a name, or who generally uses it; avoid broad assertions like "many people call it" or "some people say", as these do not help the reader understand the origin of the name and may perpetuate misconceptions.

Capitalization

 * Only the first word and proper nouns in a page title, heading, or subheading should be capitalized. For instance, use "External links", "See also", or "Homages in Doom-engine games".
 * Titles of published media follow Wikipedia's capitalization convention: in general, the first letter is capitalized and the remainder is in lower case. (See Wikipedia:Talk:Doom for the rationale.)  For example:
 * "Doom", not "DooM" or "DOOM".
 * "Compet-n", not "COMPET-N".
 * "Doom 3", not "DOOM3".
 * For source ports and WADs, the capitalization should be the one used by the author(s).

Spelling

 * The language of this site is English. With regard to localization, we follow Wikipedia's convention: there is no single required dialect, but please be consistent within each article.  Note however that id Software is an American company, and U.S. localization is therefore strongly preferred when using terms that originate from the games themselves (e.g. "armor", not "armour").
 * The Doom Wiki maintains a list of common misspellings.

Syntax

 * Do not use contractions. For example, instead of "once a chaingunner starts, they'll keep firing continuously", write "once a chaingunner starts, they will keep firing continuously".
 * Write out numbers as their English words. For example, instead of "E1M9 contains 2 barons", write "E1M9 contains two barons". However, beyond one word it makes more sense to write the number numerically: "52" rather than "fifty-two".
 * This also applies to ordinal numbers: do not write "the 1st level is easy", but rather "the first level is easy".

Grammar

 * Write in the third person, not the second person. For example, instead of "Imps will often launch fireballs at you", write "Imps will often launch fireballs at the player".
 * There are a few exceptions to this. For example, when writing a walkthrough for a level it makes more sense to "talk to the reader" as you are attempting to direct them through the level.

Images

 * For general purposes screen shots are best taken with a physical aspect ratio suitable for Internet browsers. For example, Doom in 320x200 (or a similar 640x400) needs to stretch pixels by 20% to fill the screen, and thus any screen shots taken in that mode will appear flattened within standard desktop windows or screens. To address this, these shots from Doom can be resized with a graphics editing application (to 640x480 or 800x600, for example), or a port with resolutions treating ratios in the same way as desktop modes (such as 640x480, where the pixels are square in a 4:3 aspect ratio) can be used to take suitable shots.
 * Although screen shots are permitted, raw graphics from the IWADs are not.
 * Screen shots should be taken in software rendered mode, with settings resembling vanilla Doom as closely as possible (unless the screen shot is for showing off a port specifically or belongs to an add-on that requires the use of such a source port).

See also: Image policy, Copyright policy