Roblox Wiki:Manual of Style

The Manual of Style is the style manual for all articles. It describes the guidelines that should be followed when there is doubt or disagreement about which style to follow in articles. The style manual also gives useful information and advice on article formatting and templates.

Principles
This style guide has multiple purposes. One of them is to resolve conflicts among editors. Another is to suggest good style: some style guidelines are subjective preferences, but others are preferable for objective reasons, either because they are standard and commonly accepted or because they have advantages such as resolving ambiguities. The most important purpose of this style guide, though, is consistency among articles and inside articles; thus it is preferable for an article to use the wrong style everywhere than for it to use the right style in one place and the wrong style everywhere else. This is why whenever you write an article, you should pick one style and stick to it throughout the article, and whenever you contribute new content to an article, you should follow the style currently adopted in that article.

In case of doubt
For all of the matters not discussed on this page, you should refer to the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style or to the simplified version. This manual is too large to memorize and is meant as a reference in case of disagreement between editors or doubt about which style to follow in an article. Just like you're not expected to memorize the entire dictionary before you start writing in English, you don't have to memorize the entire manual of style to contribute to articles on this wiki.

Article structure and titles
This section describes how articles should be structured and section titles formatted.

Article structure
Articles begin with an introductory lead section, which appears above the table of contents. The lead section does not have a section heading. Hatnotes, message boxes, infoboxes, and sidebars sometimes appear before the lead section.

A table of contents is automatically inserted before the first section heading when at least three headings are used in the article. The table of contents can be placed on the right with the tocright template.

Elements of an article should almost always be ordered in this manner:


 * 1) Editor comments (such as archive links)
 * 2) Hatnotes
 * 3) Article message boxes
 * 4) Infoboxes
 * 5) Lead section
 * 6) Table of contents
 * 7) Content
 * 8) See also
 * 9) Notes and references
 * 10) Further reading
 * 11) External links
 * 12) Navboxes
 * 13) Categories

Articles should not contain trivia sections or unorganized lists of miscellaneous information.

Titles
Article titles and section titles should be written in sentence case. This is sentence case; This is Not Sentence Case. The original capitalization should be kept for proper nouns, including names of experiences, groups, avatar shop items, players, events, classes, and the name of the Manual of Style itself. Section titles should only be used to describe a section of the article, should not be at the beginning of an article, and should not contain the lead text. == Appearance == followed by the article text should be used rather than == This item is red with white stripes == followed by no text.

Articles about avatar shop items
In articles about avatar shop items, content sections should be ordered according to the following list:


 * 1) Bundle content (if applicable)
 * 2) Catalog history (if applicable)
 * 3) Release history
 * 4) Limited history (if applicable)
 * 5) Appearance (if applicable)

Conflicts and disambiguation
The Catalog namespace is subject to some articles with the case of items that share the same name of other items. The following procedures are used for annotations at the end of article titles:


 * For conflicting items published by the account, the year of publishing can be appended on the end on the newer items' titles.
 * For example, Catalog:Camo Ninja (2014) and Catalog:Camo Ninja (2015).
 * For conflicting items where one was published by the Roblox account and another by a user-generated content creator, the text (UGC) can be appended on the end of the UGC item's title.
 * For example, Catalog:Blue Butterflies and Catalog:Blue Butterflies (UGC).
 * For conflicting items within UGC uploaded by the same creator that have discernible differences between them, an identifying note such as type, color, or pattern can be appended to the end of each item. Some items may require multiple of these. A disambiguation page should also be made at the base name, to link to these pages.
 * For example, Catalog:Wavy Side Part (black), Catalog:Wavy Side Part (blonde), and Catalog:Wavy Side Part (brown), with Catalog:Wavy Side Part as a disambiguation page.
 * For conflicting items within UGC where two UGC creators upload different items with the same name, the creator name can be appended to the end of each item. A disambiguation page should also be made at the base name, to link to these articles.
 * For example, Catalog:Black Headband (TheShipArchitect) and Catalog:Black Headband (Geocentrisme), with Catalog:Black Headband as a disambiguation page.
 * When UGC items meet multiple of these conflicts, multiple sets can be appended in the title in order of procedure notation.

Articles about players

 * Articles should use players' preferred gender pronouns.
 * If pronouns are not known or discernible, an article should use they and its inflected forms (their, them, and so on). The preferred pronouns of players should not be assumed.
 * Edits that attempt to purposefully revert or change pronouns to be other than a player's preferred gender pronouns in bad faith will be taken as vandalism, resulting in a block.
 * The title of an article about a player should match the current username of that player; hence if a player changes their username for an indefinite period of time, the article should be moved, leaving a redirect. Prior usernames that are sufficiently noteworthy should be documented in the lead section; for example: Currentusername (formerly previoususername).

Articles about groups

 * Group articles should not contain links to group-specific application sources or other advertisements.
 * The title of an article about a group should match the current name of that group; if a group changes its name, the article should be moved, leaving a redirect. Prior group names that are sufficiently noteworthy should be documented in the lead section; for example: Currentgroupname (formerly previousgroupname).

Articles about experiences
Titles for experience articles should generalize the name of the experience; unless necessary or otherwise discussed as an exemption, experience titles should be the basic name the experience goes as, typically omitting or ignoring the following:
 * Emojis, ASCII text decorations, and other decorative symbols
 * Update info or other additional info added on, like "UPDATE 3," "VIP!," "NEW PETS," etc.
 * Temporary names and other temporary adjustments to the name of the experience

Experience articles should not have experience-specific promotional codes documented on the article; these are suited for a wiki specific to that experience.

Wikis specific to an experience are only allowed to be linked on an article specifically to direct to that wiki if the wiki is part of the Interwiki Project; in which, it should use Template:Interwiki at the top of the page.

Dates, numbers, currencies
This section deals with formatting of dates, numbers, and currencies.

Dates and time
Dates should be formatted like October 3, 2016 or 3 October 2016, not October 3rd, 2016, October 03, 2016, 2016/10/3, or any other format. The ISO 8601 format yyyy-mm-dd can be used in tables and other locations where the dates need to be short: 2016-10-03. In templates, the #time parser function can be used, while mw.language:formatDate can be used in Scribunto modules.

Time should be formatted either in 12-hour clock times, like 2:30 p.m., or 24-hour clock times, like 14:30. Hours under 10 should have a leading zero in 24-hour clock times, like 02:30, but not in 12-hour clock times (02:30 p.m.).

Numbers
Numbers should be formatted with a comma as the thousands separator for digit grouping and a period as the decimal separator. In templates, the formatnum parser function can be used for this purpose, while mw.language:formatNum can be used in Scribunto modules.

Numbers smaller than ten should usually be written as words instead of digits in article text. That is, you should usually write one, two, three, ..., eight, nine instead of 1, 2, 3, ..., 8, 9.

Names

 * Write Roblox and Robux, not ROBLOX or ROBUX. In the instance of a Roblox event, ROBLOX or Roblox can be used: for example, ROBLOX Rally 2011.

Style
Since the is an encyclopedia, standard English should be followed in articles. American English should be preferred to other variants of English.


 * Avoid comma splices. That is, independent clauses should be separated by a semicolon, a period, a colon or an em dash, but not by a comma: write Stevenson's romances are entertaining; they are full of exciting adventures. instead of Stevenson's romances are entertaining, they are full of exciting adventures.
 * Profanity should not be used in articles, except where its use is appropriate in an encyclopedic context, such as in quotations.
 * Avoid contractions like wasn't and it's in articles.

Tables
"A table offers an excellent means of presenting a large number of individual, similar facts so that they are easy to scan and compare."

"To produce a clear, professional-looking table, rules should be used sparingly. Many tables will require just three rules, all of them horizontal—one at the very top of the table, below the title and above the column heads; one just below the column heads; and one at the bottom of the table, along the bottom of the last row, above any notes to the table."

"You will not go far wrong if you remember two simple guidelines at all times:
 * 1) Never, ever use vertical rules.
 * 2) Never use double rules."

"You want to see the data, not the lines around the data."

In articles, tables should be used only for information that is tabular in nature. There are two classes available for formatting tables: the  class defined by MediaWiki and the   class defined by Fandom. These classes are applied by adding the  attribute to the table start in the table markup. The source editor and VisualEditor insert the  class. Tables should generally be formatted with the  class.

There are two other classes made available by MediaWiki: the  class, which is used to make tables collapsible, and the   class, which is used to make tables sortable with JavaScript. Both features can be customized with other classes and attributes.

See also:


 * Fandom's table best practices for tables on mobile devices
 * Table dos and don'ts
 * The section about tables of Wikipedia's Manual of Style

Templates
This section discusses some templates available for use in articles.

Infoboxes
Infoboxes are panels put at the top right of articles that summarize key information about the article's subject. They are created using templates. Infoboxes are used for articles about avatar shop items, groups, players, experiences, events, badges, and classes; you can find the complete list of infobox templates in Category:Infobox templates. The template pages contain documentation on using the template to add an infobox to the article.

Infobox pictures
Most infoboxes have only one picture. Infoboxes have the capability of having multiple pictures by passing the  parameter a gallery, which will display it in a fashion similar to a tabber. Pictures in infoboxes are expected to meet the following requirements:

One picture:
 * Up to date (most recent).

Multiple pictures:
 * Multiple experience thumbnails must...
 * still be thumbnails of the experience.
 * be in the same order as shown on the experience's page.
 * Multiple user pictures must...
 * be in order from most recent picture to oldest picture.
 * display the most current picture first.
 * Multiple group pictures must...
 * be in order from most recent picture to oldest picture.
 * display the most current picture first.

Infoboxes should have three or fewer images. All other images should be placed in a gallery at the bottom of the page.

Source code
The syntaxhighlight tag provided by the SyntaxHighlight extension can be used to format source code blocks with syntax highlighting. There are currently no guidelines on how the source code itself should be formatted.

Stub
The stub template is appropriate when an article has little to no information. It should be used before any infoboxes or text.

Tutorial type notice
The Tutorial type notice template is used at the very top of tutorial pages to tell the difficulty of the tutorial.

Categories
This section discusses appropriate categories for specific articles.


 * For articles about avatar shop items, groups, players and places, most categories are added automatically by the infobox templates.
 * For tutorials, the scripting tutorials category should be applied for scripting tutorials. The scripting category should never be applied to tutorials.  The difficulty category and the tutorials category will be applied by the tutorial type notice template.