The Vault:Article layout guideline

On structure
One of the most important parts of wiki editing is how to structure an article. Structure dictates what information the reader reads and when they read it. It can influence what people contribute, where they put it and how it is written. Good structure is likely to produce high quality articles.

Organize sections in an article in a hierarchical structure like you would an outline. Try using a shallow structure rather than a deep one. Having too many nested sections usually leads to a confusing or unreadable article.

Section order and naming
The following table is a short overview of The Vault's standard article layout. Its purpose is to provide a quick reference for order and naming of standard layout items. This does not mean every article needs to have all of these layout items.

No in the "headline" column means that this layout item should not have a headline.
 * Yes in the "headline" column means that the article should have a headline of that name if you want to include such a layout item.

Layouts for specific types of content
There are more detailed standard layouts for certain types of articles. These are:
 * Character articles
 * Creature articles
 * Item articles
 * Location articles
 * Quest articles

The ordering and naming for standard sections outlined here applies to these layouts as well. They only contain more detailed instructions for the ordering of the actual article content.

Section ordering in multi-game articles
In articles whose subject spans multiple Fallout games, the sections for the various games should always be ordered by canonicity.

As an example, an article describes the various drugs which are known to exist in the Fallout universe. It has sections for Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics and Fallout 3. In this case, the Fallout section would come first, then Fallout 2, next Fallout 3 and lastly Fallout Tactics.