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.
Redundant or superfluous wording, such as "most important", "correct" or "absolutely" should be avoided, as they superficially inflate the importance of an article.
Also keep in mind that an article title should not be vague as that would obfuscate information. The title of an article should be clearly written and able to be readily understood from a glance.
Here are some examples of good titles:
- Hammer Editor
- Source
- Steam Deck
- Team Fortress 2
- Engine lighting
And here are some examples of bad titles:
- My favorite games (Not neutral point of view or third-person. Also shows favoritism)
- Comparison of baked lighting and engine lighting (Not concise; lengthy)
- Proper tutorial on how to create a map for the source engine (Not concise. Title also contains superfluous and pretentious wording)
- Lorem ipsum (Gibberish; dummy text with no meaning)
- Doom mappers reference (While a slim connection can be made, this topic isn't of interest to the Valve Developer Community. It is better handled by another wiki, such as the Doom Wiki)
As an exception to the above guidelines — 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 Wiki, Valve Developer Community or Valve Developer Community Wiki.
Images
Various images that have been uploaded to the wiki should be designated their own prefix or suffix in order to distinguish them from other files, and to aid in the categorization and the usage of such files on the wiki.
Below is a list of prefixes and/or suffixes that should be designated to their associated files.
User images
- User avatars: UserAvatar-
- User avatar frames: UserAvatarFrame-
- User covers: UserCover-
The suffix for user images should be the name of the user the images are associated with, e.g.: "-Example"
Note:You can put anything you want when it's come to user images, as long it's doesn't violates the Image use policy.Logo and icon images
- Logo images: Logo-
- Icon images: Icon-
Software images
- Software covers: Software Cover-
- Software page screenshots: -Screenshot #
Other
- Bug report images (including animated): Bug-
- For animated images, use GIF or APNG (Animated PNG).