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This page contains The Vault's article layout guideline. It describes content organization within articles, i.e. how articles should be structured as well as how standard content and sections should be named and ordered. | |
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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.
in the "headline" column means that this layout item should not have a headline. in the "headline" column means that the article should have a headline of that name if you want to include such a layout item.
Standard layout | ||
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Layout item | Headline | Explanation |
Page management boxes | Page management templates are used if you notice that something is out of order with a certain article or section and want to bring it to the attention of other editors or administrators. If the issue affects the whole article, these boxes should be placed at the very top of an article; if only a section is affected, they should be placed just below the headline of the respective section. The only exception are stub templates; see Stub templates below. For a list of page management boxes, please refer to our template overview or directly to Category:Page management templates. | |
Project tags | Projects are joint efforts of editors who work together to improve a set of articles that cover a certain area of interest. Some of these projects have tags or boxes which are placed on the pages which the project affects; these should be placed below the article management boxes. | |
"For" template | {{for}} is used to make a reader aware of other articles they may have been looking for when entering the title of the current page.
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Infobox | The purpose of infoboxes is to summarize data relating to the article. Infoboxes should appear in the top-right corner of an article. For a list of infobox templates, please refer to our template overview or directly to Category:Infobox templates. | |
"Games" template | {{Games}} should be placed just below the infobox (if there is one). It produces small icons in the top right corner of an article which allow the reader to see "at a glance" what games or sources the article relates to or is based on. The template should be used in every article; almost no exceptions exist.
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"Quotation" template | {{Quotation}} should be placed just below the infobox (if there is one) and aforementioned Games template. It produces the effect of emphasizing a particular phrase outside normal text flow. The template should be used in every article with an appropriate quotation.
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Lead section | Articles should generally start with a lead section which is not more than a few sentences. Its purpose is to provide a short definition or overview of the article itself; after reading it, a reader should know what the article is about. If possible, the article title should be the subject of the first sentence; alternative titles should be mentioned in the lead section as well. | |
Table of contents (TOC) | The table of contents (TOC) will automatically appear in articles with a minimum of four headings, just above the first headline. This behaviour can be changed by using __TOC__ or __NOTOC__ . __TOC__ forces a table of contents to appear wherever it is placed in an article, no matter how many headlines the article has. __NOTOC__ results in no table of contents ever being shown.
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Article content For information on writing the article itself, see our general editing guidelines. | ||
Behind the scenes | "Behind the scenes" is the place for information relating to game development and cultural references. See The Vault:Content policy#Behind the scenes for additional information. | |
Bugs | Game glitches, short "bugs", relating to the article subject should be here. See The Vault:Content policy#Bugs for additional information. | |
Gallery | If an article contains a lot of images, it is often better to place them in an own gallery section than to have them clutter the article. Please see Help:Gallery on how to use galleries and our image policy. | |
Videos | If an article contains embedded videos, they are to be placed here. See our video policy for which kind of videos are eligible to be placed in articles. | |
See also | The purpose of this section is to list links to related topics on this wiki which may not have been linked within the article content. | |
External links | Links to external (i.e. off-wiki) sites which are not references should be just above "References". | |
References | If references have been used in an article, {{references}} should be placed here.
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Stub template | A stub template marks an article as being too short to provide more than rudimentary information about a subject. | |
Navboxes | Navboxes are navigational aids which allow easy access to other articles in a group the current article belongs to. They should be placed at the end of an article, just above the categories. The most article-specific navboxes should be highest and the least-specific lowest. A list of navboxes can be found in Category:Navbox templates. New navboxes can be constructed with {{Navbox}} .
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Categories and interwiki links | Categories and interwiki links should be added at the very end of an article. A full list of categories can be found on Special:Categories. For additional information, please see our categorization guideline. |
Layouts for specific types of content
There are more detailed standard layouts for certain types of articles. These are:
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.