ARK Wiki:Style guide

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The following is a guide to creating or editing mainspace pages on the Ark: Survival Evolved Wiki in accordance with the established article style. These guidelines are not set in stone, but they should generally be followed in order to maintain consistency across pages, unless there is a good reason to make an exception.

Standard Wiki markups can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Cheatsheet.

Page types

Different page types require different page formats. See the following examples:

For Mod page guidelines, see the Mod guidelines.

General guidelines

  • The first instance of the page title should be bold. This should usually be in the first sentence of the article. No other instance of the page title should be bold. To make a word or phrase bold, place three apostrophes (') on each side. For example:'''bold'''. Bold can also be used for emphasis on other words in rare cases.
  • All creature, item and location names should be capitalized in a way consistent with the game (e.g. Shadowmane, Flak Armor Helmet, Gasbags bladder, Bamboo grove).
  • The first instance of an item name on a page should always be linked, via double brackets (e.g. [[Flak Armor Helmet]]). Further mentions of the same item should generally not be linked, though multiple identical links can exist if they occur far from each other and would be helpful to readers. An example might be one link in the introductory section along with an identical link in a section, table, or template occurring further down. Duplicate links may be especially helpful on larger pages that would require scrolling to find an item's first mention.
  • Be sure to read the page before editing. Editors frequently add notes, tips, and trivia items that duplicate information already contained in the article's paragraphs above.

Trivia

While most users of this wiki are likely dinosaur fans and would probably be interested in learning interesting facts about them, this is a wiki for ARK: Survival Evolved, not for the creature or object itself. Trivia should be related to the in-game version of the creature or object in question, and references to the real-world equivalent should describe interesting differences between the two.
For example, this would be considered appropriate:
"Jerky in real life must be made with raw meat in order to retain enough moisture to still be palatable, as opposed to cooked meat like in the game, which turns it into edible bark." - taken from the Cooked Meat Jerky page

This would not be considered appropriate:
"Megalosaurus is a member of Megalosauridae", but "The dossier says that Megalosaurus is a member of X, but it is actually a member of Megalosauridae" would be.

There are however, some areas of trivia where the line is more ambiguous, such as the meanings of names. If you aren't sure whether a piece of trivia is appropriate or not, please make a post on the article's discussion page first.

Talk

Talk pages are for suggestions regarding the structure or contents of a page, or for a discussion with a user. When editing a Talk: page, use ==Section Title== to create a new section header if the topic you want to discuss is not already on the page. For example, ==New Format Suggestion== to suggest a change in the format of a page. If the topic you wanted to discuss is already on the page, you should always use a colon(:) before your reply to make it easier to follow the flow of comments. When you are finished with your editing, insert a break tag by using <br/> to move your signature to the next line and then sign it using -- ~~~~.

Suggestions

Suggestions should ONLY be related to the Ark: Survival Evolved Wiki, not to the game itself. If you'd like to get in contact with ARK developers, please utilize the game's Steam forums or email the developers at [email protected].