This page contains the Mental Omega Wiki's article layout guideline. It describes how content should be arranged on an article page to be clear and exhaustive.
- Guidelines describe desired etiquette and common practice in the creation, editing and organization of articles on this wiki.
- Any registered editor is free to edit this page to improve its readability as long as the essence of the article remains unchanged.
- If you would like to suggest content changes or propose a new policy or guideline, please use the wiki discussion forum.
- See the policies and guidelines page for an overview of this wiki's policies and guidelines.
On structure
One of the most important parts of wiki editing is how to structure an article. Structure dictates what information the reader reads and when he or she reads it. It can influence what people contribute, where they put it and how it is written. Good structure is likely to produce high quality articles.
Organize sections in an article in a hierarchical structure like you would an outline. Try using a shallow structure rather than a deep one. Having too many nested sections usually leads to a confusing or unreadable article.
Unit and building articles
- Example: Conscript
In general, articles should have the following subpages and sections, in the following order (bold elements are a must-have):
- Unit/Current version: the unit's information (as of the current version)
- UnitBox/BuildingBox template: Infobox containing key information; abilities and upgrades should feature their icons, standardized to 20 pixel (20px) width
- Cameo: icon used to represent the unit/building in the interface, aligned to the left; icons larger than 100 pixels should be standardized to 100px width; smaller should be left as is
- Introductory sentence: short sentence providing the name, type, affiliation and game in which the unit/building appears.
- (Official) description: section explaining the history, equipment, weapons and all other lore-related stuff is explained. Official description must be the same from the official website. If there's wrong typo or outdated contents, set {{Sic}} or Notes to them. Breaking the format may cause a ban.
- Overview: strictly gameplay-related section, describing the unit as it actually behaves in the game. Images of showing the unit's feature should also be put here instead of Gallery section.
- Assessment: the unit's pros and cons.
- Quotes: a list of the unit's quotes; not needed on structures and units that do not speak
- Gallery: all images related to the unit, such as official screenshots, renders, cut content snapshots, concept art etc. go here
- Behind the scenes: section for noting cut content, changes that occured during development etc.
- Trivia: Miscellanous notes that don't fit anywhere else; to be used sparingly
- Changelog: list of changes that occurred in version updates
- Navbox: any applicable navboxes go at the end of the article, but before categories
- Old version(s): the unit's information in the previous versions. See below for details
References: the references heading, together with the Reflist template should be placed at the end of the article if any <ref> tags are used
Categories: To be placed at the end of the article; see this guideline for details on categorizing articles
Old version(s) criterion
You should follow these rules when adding contents from old versions, in the order of decreasing priority (the rules higher up on the list always taken precedence over the ones lower on the list):
- Official names
- Internal register names
- Sprites/appearances (for structures only)
- Functionality (within the same series only, unless it's for support powers or superweapons)
Examples:
- Different iterations of Apocalypse Tanks are listed together regardless of their internal IDs.
- Sea Sled is listed under Piranha Minisub/Old because they share the same internal IDs.
- Obviously, the same structure sprites are often used across the versions with very few changes. Palace and Science Lab are dealt with based on their sprites. For the same reason, images for old versions of buildings should preferably be the snowy version when their appearances in the 3.x series are mostly the same since snow theater variants are removed in version 3.0.
- Deviator is listed under Irritator/Old because they are both in the 3.x series and have very similar functionalities. Support powers and superweapons like Mutation, Injection, and Mindhaze are dealt in a similar way.
So far the only notable exception is the Tyrant and the old Scavenger.[1]