Roblox Wiki:WikiOp API documentation/Conventions

This page provides recommendations for organizing and formatting API documentation articles. See Project:Class documentation to understand the documentation templates used in these articles.

Formatting
Names of variables and function and API member parameters should be put in italics.

Links
Appropriate links help readers find related information and understand documentation articles. They should be added in article leads, at the opening of sections, and anywhere readers are likely to want to read another article.

Linking a class
The class link template should be used to link to a class page in lists and templates. For example,  would produce. In article text, either  or   can be used, but only one of the two styles should be used inside an article.

Linking a class member
It is possible to create a link to any section of an article. The templates used to document class members add an anchor for each member of a class with the same name as the member. For example,  will produce, a link to the FindFirstChild method of the Instance class. Such links are often useful. When linking to another section of the same page, the name of the page can be omitted. For example, on, the link could simply be.

Underlinking
Articles about instance classes, enums, and data types, as well as the libraries in the global namespace, should contain links to any concepts necessary to understand their purpose and any classes, members, or other API entities referenced in their documentation. They should also link to articles explaining technical terms and jargon needed to understand the documentation. Hatnote templates can be used to link to articles with information relevant to a section in the documentation.

If no article exists about a concept or an API entity, it is still appropriate to create a link. The page does not exist, but can be created later and will show up in Special:WantedPages.

Do not be afraid of creating many links to different pages in API documentation articles. Because these articles serve mainly as references, links are more likely to be useful than distracting.

Overlinking
It is not necessary to link concepts that are not technical, unless their articles contain information that can help the reader.

For most articles on the wiki, it is recommended that a link appear only once in the article text (excluding templates and tables), at the first mention. In API documentation articles, the recommendation is different: both for links to concepts and links to API entities, the first reference to a concept or entity in a section of the article (especially sections about class members) should be linked. Further references in the same section should not be linked. API documentation articles are not read from top to bottom but are parsed by readers for the particular information they are interested in, so links should be repeated for each different section of the article, as long as it is likely that some readers will read it while having skipped previous sections.