Difference between revisions of "Editing Rules: General"

Revision as of 13:55, 19 September 2016

This page is a list of general editing rules that apply to all pages.

Community

The Videogame Music Preservation Foundation thrives on its community. It is important to help out and encourage new editors rather than insult them for not getting it right. Be courteous and patient; nobody is expected to immediately become familiar with all the templates on their first day! Naturally, bullying will not be tolerated; be excellent to each other!

Tone

Since this site is meant to be encyclopedic, try to keep a professional tone to your writing. However, it's also about videogames, which are meant to be entertaining, and we want the site to reflect that. Feel free to add more creative text in screenshot captions or other areas that aren't as important for conveying music-related information.

Opinions

When describing games, composers, companies, etc., try to use factual language rather than personal opinions. Widely-held opinions are acceptable, for example, you can write, "Final Fantasy III (SNES) is a well-loved game," because it ranks so highly in review sites or, "Silver Surfer (NES) is extremely hard," because so many sites rank it very difficult. However, try to avoid personal attacks like, "Koji Kondo is a bad composer," or, "the creators of Die Hard (NES) are terrible."

Name Referencing

This site uses the modern professional referencing technique of last name identification. The initial mention of a name should be a person's full name, but subsequent mentions should use just the last name. For example:

Koji Kondo composed the music to Super Mario Bros. (NES). Kondo did this by converting music he played on a piano into hexadecimal values for use in an audio driver."

Dates

The VGMPF uses the ISO 8601 standard for date layouts. That is YYYY-MM-DD with each section separated by hyphens and with leading zeroes. So, the American format of July 15, 2013 should look like, 2013-07-15.

The VGMPF had been up for a few years before this standard was used, so some of the earlier pages still have non-standard dates and editors are encouraged to update any old formats that don't match.

Dates In Tables

When dates are displayed in a table, such as a composer's gameography or a chronological list on a series page, use the following rules:

• Less precise dates should be listed after precise dates. For example: 1991-09-20, then 1991-09-??, then 1991-??-??.
• Games released on the same date should be alphabetically sorted by title.
• These rules should only be broken when a game is known to have been released before another despite their missing precision. When games are sorted outside of the expected order above, make a note in the Discussion page to explain why.

Updating Templates

Over the years, the site has improved the design of its templates, but many pages still use the older styles. This gives the site a non-uniform and dated look. Editors are encouraged to, at their leisure, upgrade old pages to meet the new template design specifications. Try to do more popular pages first, as they will be seen the most, and their layout is more likely to be copied from by rookie editors.

Claiming a Page

Since this Wiki is a public endeavor, its content is owned by the community itself, not any one individual editor. However, most pages are created by an individual editor who put a lot of work into it, and it is considered impolite to make major modifications without considering them. Naturally, spelling and grammatical errors can be fixed without asking, as can filling in unknown credits, adding new rips, screenshots, etc., but if you intend to make a large change to someone's writing, it's best to either ask permission to make the change, or suggest that they fix their work. Check the page's history and find the primary editor and talk to them about it on their user discussion page.

See Also

• Editing Rules