Monsterpedia:Manual of Style

At Monsterpedia, we have certain ways of displaying content in articles. This page serves as a way of informing users of what design choices to adhere to when editing or creating articles.

Text

 * Bold is used to make text stand out, and can be used as a title in some cases, without having to increase the text size into another heading format. Additionally, the page title must be displayed in bold at the beginning of an article.
 * Italic text should be used when displaying titles of media from the Monsters, Inc. franchise.
 * Use links to link to other articles on the wiki. However, there should only be one link to a specific article, though some exceptions include infoboxes and quotes.
 * Use bulleted lists to display a list that does not require a particular order.
 * Use numbered lists to display a list in a specific order.
 * Though indents are rarely used on articles, they should be used to reply to messages on talk pages.
 * Use "Normal text" to write in a normal font size. The "Heading 2" format should be used for new sections, while the "Heading 3", "Heading 4", and "Heading 5" formats should be used when creating additional sub-sections.
 * Text should almost always be aligned to the left.

Grammar and Spelling
This wiki uses American standards, as the Monsters, Inc. franchise was initially created in America. As such, certain words may be spelled differently from their British spelling. Some examples include using "color" instead of "colour", "favorite" instead of "favourite", and "rumor" instead of "rumour".

Contractions, such as "don't", should not be used on articles, in favor of having a more professional sound. Instead, words like "do not" should instead be used. Obvious exceptions include quotes.

Amount of information
One thing to note about the Monsters, Inc. franchise is that there are several characters, objects, locations, and whatnot that are more prominent than others. Information should be kept at an appropriate amount; for example, Mike Wazowski's article should have more than just a few sentences and pictures, whereas articles such as Andy Fungus should not include a large amount of information.

Images
Images must be uploaded in a fair quality; they should not be blurry or significantly small. When added to articles, they should be sized at 200px. In photo galleries, images should be 185px in size. Galleries, as well as captions for gallery images, should also be in center position, with no border surrounding the images.

If a gallery becomes overly long, it should be separated into a complete different page. To do this, create a new page with "/Gallery" after the page title. For example: Mike Wazowski/Gallery.

Trivia
Trivia sections should not be overly long; if a trivia section reaches over eight bullets, the information should be moved to other sections of the article, or to an entirely new one.

Edit summaries
Though not required, edit summaries are a very helpful way of allowing users, most importantly administrators, to review edits. These should be used to explain the changes in a short 2-3 sentence summary. Though you will not be warned or blocked for not adhering to this, it can be quite an annoyance to other users.

Stubs
Stubs should only be used if an article has not reached its full potential; as mentioned earlier, if a page like Mike Wazowski only has a few sentences and images, it should be marked as a stub. However, if an article on a minor character or location includes as much information as possible, even if it only a few sentences, it should not be marked as a stub.

Categories
We try to keep categories at a minimum. Categories should only be created if they are able to include a large amount of articles, at least twenty. Some examples of acceptable categories include "Characters", "Media", "Party Central", while some examples of unnecessary categories are "Blue monsters" and "Media that Scott "Squishy" Squibbles appears in".