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Welcome to the main Coppermind Style Guide. This article is fairly incomplete at the moment, but we're working on it. (Writing style guides are kinda hard, as you might imagine!) So, we apologize for the messiness for now.
These style conventions try to make the wiki both easy to read and easy to write. If you're a new wiki editor, we recommend that you don't really worry about all of the conventions; just write! Other editors will adapt things so they fit more in line with Coppermind standards. The most important thing is new content, don't get bogged down in the details.
Of course, if you're the person who really likes the details and wants to know how to edit other people's work to be in line with the conventions, well, here's a bunch of conventions!
==General Style==
Use American English (British English isn't a big deal, but the British-isms will probably be eventually edited out). So, use [[aluminum]] instead of aluminium.
To create a new paragraph, make sure you have an empty line. If you just press enter once, the wiki will render that new line as part of the same paragraph. Do not put each sentence of a paragraph on their own line, just write like you normally would.
You don't have to wikilink every instance of every term on a page! That gets tedious really quick. Instead, you need only to link the first instance of a new term on the page (this is why many articles have their first paragraph full of links to other articles!). You can add additional wikilinks if it is convenient. Long articles, for example, can benefit from linking terms in each new section, but that remains your stylistic preference as an editor. However, new terms in the article should definitely be linked.
In a strange turn of events with the wiki software, there's a difference between the quotation marks that, say, Word produces and those that a plain text editor. Normal text editors like Notepad or the wiki edit screen produce characters like " and '. But, if you typed "Vin's" into Word, that apostrophe would be more "curly". Word does this because that makes things look better in a book or printed page, but the wiki software makes a distinction between normal quotes and the curlier "smart" quotes. When possible, use normal quotes.
== Article titles ==
Titles of articles should be singular. However, it is easy to have wikilinks that are plural which direct to singular titles. For example: <nowiki>[[Highprince]]s</nowiki> instead of <nowiki>[[Highprinces]]</nowiki>. You can also use apostrophes similarly.
Beware that, on multiple word wiki titles, there is a difference between "Shattered plains" and "Shattered Plains". Always use standard capitalization for terminology. MediaWiki also differentiates articles depending on whether apostrophes are smart quotes or not, so be sure to use regular quotes, not the curlier quotes a rich word processor like Microsoft Word produces.
==Capitalization==
*Locations - Dominance, Luthadel, Fadrex City, Urteau, Ashmounts, Pits of Hathsin, etc.
*Individual Cultures and Organizations - Terris, Khlennium, Synod, Keepers, Worldbringers, etc.
*
'''Things to never be capitalized:'''
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