Help:Manual of Style

The Manual of Style (MoS or MOS) is the style manual for all Dragdown Wiki articles. This primary page is supported by further Writing Character Pages and Writing System Explanations. If any contradiction arises, this page has precedence. Failing to follow this document is considered a violation of user policy. In the majority of situations no action will be taken against a user who fails to follow this guide because the admins involved recognize that mistakes happen, and not every user is confident and comfortable with editing wikis. With that made clear, the team does still reserve the right to remove user's edit access if that user makes egregious and intentional violations of this page.

Retaining Existing Styles
Sometimes the MoS provides more than one acceptable style or gives no specific guidance. The Moderation Team has expressed the principle that "Format is flexible and individual users can push innovation". This does not mean anything goes. If you believe an alternative style would be more appropriate for a particular section, please discuss it in the Dragdown Discord.

Edit-warring over style is never acceptable.

General Writing Style
Dragdown aims at being an impartial, community driven source of information and education. In order to achieve that, articles need to be written in a manner conducive to maintaining trust, professionalism, and respect. Dragdown would also like to recognize that a significant audience of the site does not speak English as their first language, and so the administration of the site asks that sentences are kept relatively simple when possible.

As a general rule of thumb:
 * Avoid excessively emotive language when possible. (eg: "insanely oppressive offense and abysmally awful defense")
 * Try to be impartial and objective. (eg: "I typically use it in this situation for..." is not very appropriate, but "Can be used in thsi situation for..." is generally better.)
 * Avoid using swears whenever possible.
 * Never use slurs under any circumstances.

To add to that point, Dragdown needs to be written agnostic to the skill of the reader. You should try to not assume a certain level of reader competence; write such that even a beginner could understand it, or include supplementary information via tooltips and links to catch readers up to speed on a text. An easy way to achieve this is to stick to the descriptive nature of what the character can do as opposed to what the player can do. Instead of "you can block while in the air", write "X Character can block while in the air".

Casual language and inside jokes are acceptable, so long as they are kept in moderation.

English, Please!
Dragdown is an English website. Until the day comes that we have the resources, staff, and volunteers to set up an infrastructure for multiple languages, that will continue to be the case. Therefore, the wiki should remain in English.

Furthermore, the English localization always take priority. If the English and Japanese text for a game on this wiki differ, the official English Localization take priority.

(More to be added soon)