Valve Developer Community:Style guide
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This article details the conventions concerning the styling of pages on the Valve Developer Community. Considering that people have their own writing styles, and that they learn differently from each other, then that means there will be noticeable opposition in terms of opinions, quality of articles, and cooperation.
This guide should hopefully aid in dispelling that notion, and therefore standardize a consistent style of writing and formatting throughout the wiki. However, covering all situations concerning styling would take an extended period of time, and as such the following content is only meant to act as a reference for content specific to the Valve Developer Community.
Article titles
The title of an article should be short and sweet. As a general rule of thumb, the starting character of each world in a page title should be capitalized, and the following characters should be lowercase. This isn't a necessity, and there may be exceptions to this rule, but doing it this way helps maintain consistency.
Redundant or superfluous wording, such as "most important", "correct" or "absolutely" should be avoided, as should the use of pronunciation marks, as they superficially inflate the importance of an article.
Also keep in mind that an article should cover one topic only, and it should do that well. An article should not cover various subjects or topics, as doing so would obfuscate information.
Here are some examples of good titles:
- Hammer Editor
- Source
- Steam Deck
- Team Fortress 2
- Lighting
And here are some examples of bad titles:
- How to create your first Hammer Editor map properly! ("properly" is superfluous and opinionated)
- My favorite games
- Baked lighting - guide and comparison to engine lighting
- Why I love the source engine
- List of noteworthy character quotes
As an exception to the above, user namespace pages may be named as you see fit, just as long as the names for the pages aren't vulgar, offensive or juvenile. E.g: User:Example/My guide to cubemaps (Completely acceptable pagename).
Wording
Valve Developer Community
When referring to the name of the wiki in articles, it should be used in one of two ways:
Short hand
- VDC, VDC Wiki, or simply Wiki.
Long hand
- Valve Developer Community or Valve Developer Community Wiki.
User images
Images that have been uploaded for use on user pages should be designated the User- prefix in order to distinguish them from other files. This includes, but is not limited to:
- User avatars, e.g.: UserAvatar-Username
- User avatar frames, e.g.: UserAvatarFrame-Username
- User covers, e.g.: UserCover-Username
Images being designated the User- prefix also aid in the usage of various templates, such as {{User page}} or {{Message}}, as these templates utilize images with those prefixes.
Logo and icon images
Like user images, logo and icon images should also be designated their own prefix. For logo images it's Logo-, and for icon images it's Icon-. Naming logo and icon images this way helps in searching and categorizing such images, as well as utilizing them within templates, as mentioned previously with user images.
Software images
For images that are intended to be used on software pages, make sure you specify the correct prefix for your images.
- For the covers used on software pages, specify the prefix Software Cover-, e.g.: "Software Cover - Half-Life"
- For the screenshots used on software pages, make sure to specify the prefix Screenshot #-, e.g.: "Screenshot 1 - Half Life"
And as mentioned previously: naming an image with a prefix helps in the usage of templates ({{Software page}} in this case), and in the categorization of the aforementioned images.