Greyhawk Wiki:Manual of Style

This page describes the style that all pages in the main namespace should follow.

This wiki should never be able to be used as a replacement for purchasing the actual books of any edition. This includes both mechanics and lore.

Manual of style

For more specific or individual guidance, please also see the general Writing Guidelines policy and specific guidelines by type of page for the Great Library of Greyhawk wiki.

This wiki follows the Chicago Manual of Style

• This wiki uses the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition as its basis for use in cases of grammar, punctuation, citation, word use, etc.
• This wiki also follows the D&D House Style Guide (updated January 2019) for specific use of mechanics, formatting, term usage, numbers in game terms, etc.

All content must be cited

ALL content must be cited. If you do not know or cannot say where it's from, don't put it on the wiki. Citation templates such as Cite sourcebook should be used. At minimum, an in-line parenthetical citation should be given; e.g.— (The Adventure Begins, p.107).

All work must be original

No AI work

To be respectful of rights of the creators (authors, artists, and others), all work submitted to this wiki must be the original work of a person or persons, without the use of AI.

No plagiarism

This does not apply to brief, contextual quotes from individual persons (authors, artists, editors, etc). Nor to concise and succinct quoted text from sourcebooks. As with all other content, quotations must be cited individually.

• Articles must be written with significant differences to the language used in the source material while still conveying the content in a neutral, encyclopedic tone.
• Changing a few synonyms or sentence/phrase order does not avoid plagiarism. (it is sometimes called "synonymized plagiarism", "mosaic plagiarism", or "patch writing").
• Descriptions and lore cannot be wholesale transcribed word for word from any copyrighted text.
• Such content must always be summarized in a way that does not devalue the original source. If possible, this summary should include information from other sources, in such a way that it expands on the knowledge in a meaningful way.

No original research

Though all writing must be original, this means articles may not contain unofficial arguments, concepts, data, opinions, speculation, or theories. This prohibition means that Great Library of Greyhawk editors' own analysis or synthesis should not be included in articles. Basically, this wiki is a record of knowledge, viewpoints, and summaries that already exist from official sources and are expressed elsewhere, not a repository for speculative writing.

Generic terms and items

Magic items

• Unnamed, generic, or otherwise non-descript magic items do not get their own pages.

—For example, wand of fireballs, staff of the magi, scroll of strength, +5 holy avenger, or elven chainmail, etc.

• Do include pages like Fragarach, Hand of Vecna, Kuroth's Quill, Sword of Dunstan or other items, especially artifacts or "named" items which have lore specific to the World of Greyhawk™.

Self-evident terms

Readers of this wiki are presumed to already understand some terms, and these terms do not need to be defined or given articles/pages. This is not Wikipedia, and all content should be specific information relating to Greyhawk.

For example,

• General terms not specific to the World of Greyhawk™

E.g., terms like bread, longsword, armor, king, monarchy, castle, or highway

• Game-terms

E.g., initiative, alignment, or ability scores, (i.e. Strength, Dexterity, Wisdom).

E.g., roleplaying game, Dungeons & Dragons, player character, or dungeon master

An exception to this general rule are class names which link to lists or groups of characters—like wizard, rogue, cleric, or fighter.

• Individual, non-unique spell names should never be defined or wikilinked.

E.g., magic missle, fireball, cure wounds, or teleport.

Naming conventions

Page names

Singular titles

All article names should be in singular form (e.g., "elf" not "elves", or "deity" not "deities"), although there can be some exceptions like Lists or Categories (for example, List of Greyhawk adventures in Dungeon magazine or "Orcish deities"). Article titles should be as short as possible without being an abbreviation. If an article can have two or more names, it should be named with the most popular word and then create redirects from the other possible names.

Definite articles

Main page: Wording and Capitalization

Though article titles should be singular, they should not include sigular definite articles such as "A", "An", or "The". These should only be included when it is part of a proper noun. For example, "University of Magical Arts" not "The University of Magical Arts", or "Royal District" not "The Royal District", even though it may be said or used that way.

However, if a definite article is part of the name of a sourcebook title, it should be included in an article title. E.g., "A Guide to the World of Greyhawk" is the correct name of the sourcebook. Note: this may lead to very narrow distintions between some articles. For example, the "City of Greyhawk" (a place) and The City of Greyhawk (a source).

Multiple names

Sometimes, a page can have multiple titles. In this case, the most well-known word should be used. For example, the common name of the moon is Luna, though it is technically also named Raenei.

Sentence case

Main page: Wording and Capitalization

Article/page names, as well as section headings, are written in "sentence case" and will begin with a capital letter, and should not contain any other capital letters unless the title is a proper noun, eg: a person's or place's given name.

Correct	Incorrect
Rumors and legends	Rumors and Legends
Publication history	Publication History
Selintan River	Selintan river
Royal Opera House	Royal opera house

NPC stats

Main page: Writing Guidlines about NPC stats

When NPCs are referred to on any page, and are followed by brief stat blurbs, they should be in paranthesis, in the following format:

title [[NPC name]] (alignment gender species class/level)

e.g., Lady [[Debbie Smith]] (LG female human Pal8), or Chief [[Gorin Tuskman]] (NE male orc Ftr5)

Rules and Mechanics

(Such as creature statistics, class features, and so on)

This is primarily a lore wiki. By and large, mechanics are seldom necessary to the information presented. In some corner cases, mechanics are beneficial to providing lore for a topic of an article. Mechanics should only be included in limited fashion or when necessary. (Such as in the parameters of an Infobox template, e.g., class levels). The following presents some few guidelines for including mechanics—

Mecanics which change by edition

Some mechanics don't change all that much between editions, like ability scores or levels. Some, however do—especially since things like HD, HP, damage, modifiers, or other rules may change depending on which edition is used. A good guideline is that if every user of this wiki plays a different edition or game system, if that info only applies to one—a different way to include that information should be found, or it should not be included.

Don't include class level mechanics. The abilities of a level 3 paladin, for example, don't need to be explicitly stated in an article about an NPC. In most cases, they either may change by edition or are implicitly understood and do not need to be restated.

Make mechanics understandable

Names of abilities, feats and so on can be included and explained only as much as necessary to give context. Explain what an ability's name means, without resorting to numbers and mechanics. Mechanics of them are seldom necessary .

• If a feat is mentioned, the description might be given (or quoted), but the mechanical "Benefits" aren't necessary for context.

For example, if an NPC was known to have the "Tavern Brawler" feat, it might just say "Accustomed to rough-and-tumble fighting using whatever weapons happen to be at hand" without mechanics (citation must be given for quotes).

Mechanics only in context

Material commonly called "crunch" is not often needed for context. When it is used, it should be used sparingly and written in such a way that it remains useful knowledge without relying on rule mechanics to define it.

• While "able to cast sleep" is acceptable, information on casting time, targets, HD of targets, actual spell description, and similar rules elements are not strictly related to the topic of the page, and should not be included.
• Do not include dice rolls. If information is dependent on dice roll (such as weight and height), the average or upper and lower limits may be given, without mention of the exact dice used.

For example, if an NPC has a magical item, it is acceptable to write "+2 longsword of sharpness", and include short descriptions of any other unique abilities. It does not need "2d8+13 damage".

Citing mechanics

Citing sources is required. If applicable, use free, legal resources.

Whenever possible, if mechanics are cited or stated in a wiki article, they should be cited to a free resource available to everyone, such as a System Reference Document (SRD) 5.1, or the Free Rules and Basic Rules rather than something like a third party website. As is obvious, "free resources" applies only to sources legally available online, and information still may be cited from other offficial print sources (like hardbacks and sourcebooks), instead. If cited from the SRD 5.1, place {{SRD}} at the end of the == Bibliography == section, to add attribution, as required by the Creative Commons licensing agreement (see below).