Warhammer 40k - Lexicanum:Guidelines

Helpful articles

Lexicanum is a joint project with the goal of creating as complete an encyclopdia of the Warhammer universes as possible.

To work on Lexicanum, you must follow the guidelines below. Questions about these can be asked at the Open Discussion page.

Guidelines

• Do not infringe on copyright: The publication of text or pictures without permission of the rightful owner can lead to serious problems for the project. This is especially relevent to Games Workshop and the patent rights regulations are here.

• Lexicanum is an encyclopedia: Lexicanum should be used to develop an encyclopedia. It is not a dictionary or fan site, and is not a carrior for business interests.

• Respect other users: The participents of Lexicanum come from many different places and backgrounds and often have a different point of view.

• Neutrality: The neutral point of view tries to present ideas in a way that both those who agree with, and disagree with, can accept the way it is written. It does not demand the acceptance of all, as some ideologies reject all points other than their own. Therefore, the goal should be to create a place where all rational ideas can be collected together in a presentable way.

• Categories: In order to keep the encyclopedia clear from the beginning, we have created some categories. Whether they are all sensible will show in time. It is highly recommended however to use the categories provided and then change them later. The location of the category link should always be at the bottom of the article.

• Orthography: Lexicanum does not commit itself to old or new spelling rules. Both are to be respected. The author who wrote the article follows their set of rules and as such subsequent changes must follow the same sets. This avoids having different spellings throughout one article.

Who is going to enforce these rules?

You as a Lexicanum editor makes you effectivly an editor-in-chief. Active members look at recent changes and correct contents and format. Each participent is at the same time an author and editor and is just as responsible for the content as the next person.

In order to make things easier to navigate (and edit), Lexicanum has a general formatting "style" that should be followed when editing articles. Below are the basic guidelines.

Naming Conventions

Singular v. Plural

In general, all articles should be named with the singular form of the topic, so Space Marine is preferred to Space Marines. However, the plural form may be used if the singular form is rarely (or never) encountered, such as with most Space Marine chapters. On the other hand, Categories are generally named in the plural form.

Squads and Models

The best way to create articles for units in the game is to name them by what they come under in the codex. For instance, an Imperial Guard Veterans would be tempting to call Veterans, when in actual fact that refurs to the single model in the Hardened Veteran squad. Therefore, the name for the Hardened Veterans is the Hardened Veteran squad. Note that in the Imperial Guard, a squad is made of 10 men/ogryns/ratlings etc. while platoons are made up of squads and where there is only a couple of units (single figures) they are named by their singular name, such as Techpriest Enginseer. Also note that 'squad' and 'platoon' are in lower case as they are not actually part of the name.

Models themselves will be contained within the squad/platoon etc. article with a section of their own, for example Terminator would be part of Terminator squad.

Categories

Categories v. Articles

Categories are a useful way of organizing articles, but there are some standards that editors should follow. Most importantly, a category page (such as Category:Space Marines) should not contain a detailed writeup of the topic. Instead, create a separate article - in this example, Space Marine, which is in its own category and in Category:Space Marines parent category. Thus, the article Space Marine is in Category:Space Marines and Category:Imperium.

Parent Categories

You may have noticed that in the above example, Category:Space Marines has a parent category: Category:Imperium. In general, most categories should have a parent category of some kind, especially if they are listed in the table of contents at Categories. Note that you only need to list the immediate parent, not all the parents.

This article is based on the guidelines from the free encyclopedia Wikipedia and stands under the GNU license for free documentation. Within Wikipedia is a list of authors available, and there you can work on the article.