Dothack Wiki:Manual of Style

Welcome to the .hack//Wiki Manual of Style, your one-stop shop for all your guidance needs when it comes to editing the .hack//Wiki. For more basic guidance, you can consult the Help page. If you have any further questions or concerns feel free to ask at the Community Portal.

What .hack//Wiki is NOT

 * .hack//Wiki is not Wikipedia. We do not abide by all of their standards or their Manual of Style.  This allows us more freedom, such as the ability to create placeholder articles with a bare amount of information, and the ability to implement information that might otherwise be considered "original research."
 * Amusingly, our main concern regarding this declaration is that we name list articles as "X" rather than "List of X."
 * .hack//Wiki is not a walkthrough, strategy guide, or FAQ. It does, however, contain lists of information that may prove to be useful.
 * .hack//Wiki is not about the fans. It's about .hack. Information within the Wiki should contain only official and researched information, not speculation or biased favoritism.
 * .hack//Wiki is not a rumor forum. All information must be undeniable and helpful to the article as a whole and not to a particular idea or rumor.
 * The BBS, however is a forum. All speculation or favoritism, should be taken to the Chaos Gate BBS. If there is a particular idea or rumor, it may be taken to the Arena for debate.

Uploading images
Make sure the image is actually of good quality, not some pixelated piece of crap. Have the image name make sense, like a picture of BlackRose from Another Birth would be ABBlackRose.jpg, or something like that. In addition, you MUST link to the site you got the image from. After many long debates of stealing images, this must be done in order to preserve the website's claim of images. If you scanned it yourself, just note the media it came from, like .hack//analysis or Perfect Guidebook. In addition, do your best to find an image without a watermark. Watermarks are ugly and detract from the image. Screencaps, scans, and official artwork found on the web are acceptable. Fanart is not acceptable under most circumstances.

AS SOON AS YOU UPLOAD the image, implement the image into an article. If you don't do this, you'll have accomplished nothing but using up space. The rest of the community does not consist of psychics. We cannot always guess the reason behind an upload, and it may end up just getting deleted.

DO NOT use the Upload tool as your own image hosting service, or for images for use only in user pages; use a separate image hosting service such as Photobucket.

Profile Pictures
Use only "official" artwork.
 * Preferably clean, clear, accurate concept art, either full-body or face.
 * Failing that, a clear screenshot or scan will do.
 * If none of the above are available, possibly due to lack of availability, such as in the case of an upcoming series, negligible-quality magazine scans or photos can be used in the meantime, but should be deleted once clearer artwork is available.

Avoid image overload
Do not upload just any images because they look good. This is true even if the images happen to be official and of excellent quality. In general, if we can't implement the image, don't upload it. We are currently dealing with the issue of too many images by providing galleries, but this is something we would prefer to avoid if possible.

Uploading Videos
If you wish to upload a video, consult Kulaguy first. He has created a specific YouTube account for .hack//Wiki videos located here. Most of the time, videos are not needed. If they are, they will be uploaded at his discretion. Do NOT upload videos yourself.

Moving pages
Before moving pages, make a discussion for it first, or else be severely attacked.

New series
Since most .hack works are preceded with ".hack//" we exclude that as part of the article name (the same goes for ".hack//G.U."). Thus, ".hack//SIGN" becomes "SIGN," etc. However, do include the full title in the body of the article.

Character pages
This is the way almost all character pages should be formatted. For characters in Project .hack, use this template:

For characters found in .hack Conglomerate, use this template:

If there is something in the template that cannot be filled in, usually the Real Life info, just put a "??" there. For something that doesn't apply to the character, like Real Life info to AIs, put an "N/A" there.

After the template is done, the rest of the page needs formatting. This is what follows:

==Online== ===Appearance=== Obviously this is where you put a description of the character's online persona. If the character has multiple forms, put a little section for each one. For example, Haseo's would be:

 ====1st Form====  ''Description of 1st Form.   ====2nd Form==== '' Description of 2nd Form.

===Personality=== Description of their personality goes here.

==Offline== ===Basic Info=== Basic Info of their real lives. Make sure to bold their player name if given. If there is enough info about their hobbies to constitute a section, make one like this: ===Hobbies=== Info about their hobbies go here. If there is not enough info on their hobbies, do not put this section up.

==History== This is where you list chronologically all of the character's appearance and give a description of that they did in that series.

==See also...== If there is another article that is so closely related to the current one, you can add it here. Like putting Piros in the "See also..." section of Piros the 3rd.

==Trivia== Little bits of trivia goes here

That is all that's needed to format a character's page.

Same Character, Multiple Articles
When does a character get a separate page? The general rule of thumb is "every infobox gets a separate article". Thus, because someone like Silver Knight has a character in R:1, R:2, and R:X, that means there are three infoboxes we can fill out, and thus, three separate articles, regardless of the fact that his main source of relevancy is in SIGN (R:1) and all other appearances are basically cameos. Note that in this case, all of the relevant information in those articles must only include information on that character in that era. Thus, there is no need to re-state Silver Knight's history from R:1 in his R:2 or R:X articles, except where such information is relevant and/or necessary; for instance, Natsume's remaining infatuation with Kite in R:2 and her ownership of the Spiral Edge allows for relevant callbacks, but information about her e-mails from the first games or the Level10Vine dungeon are irrelevant and have no place in the article.

Likewise, "real life" information on the characters may change from era to era. Even if it is revealed that exactly the same player is using an identical character in a new era, do not assume anything more than their name and age. Even in fiction, people can change careers, relationships, likes, dislikes, personality, and even their own names as time passes.

First Appearances
For character infoboxes, the "First Appearance" row refers to the character's first appearance in "our" timeline. Thus, even though Orca appears in AI Buster, which predates the Games, he was first introduced to "us" in INFECTION, so his "First Appearance" is ".hack//INFECTION." For all intents and purposes, we currently count trailers and similar promotional media for the purposes of the first appearance, so Haseo's first appearance is .hack//G.U.: Rebirth and not Roots, despite the fact that the first episode of Roots aired before the first G.U. game was released.

Name Bolding
At the beginning of an article, The subject of the article's name should be bolded, but nothing else. The original Japanese name, if applicable, should not be bolded, but the translation should be italicized. Example: Aura (アウラ, Aura) is the...

Server Symbols
Just in case you didn't know, you can easily use the following code for the server symbols.

Δ Type

Θ Type

Λ Type

Σ Type

Ω Type

Cleanup and Update
Insert the tag at the top of articles that are missing vital information or otherwise need to be proofread. Insert instead the tag for articles in which the majority of the information needed or provided is found in works that are yet to be translated. (Which is the case for most of the .hack Conglomerate) Note that the Update tag works as a specific type of Cleanup tag, so there is never any need to use both at the same time in one article.

English version takes precedence over Japanese version
English version names will be used in this Wiki, with the name changes (and the original name and kanji) noted in the trivia section for each character. Should different versions of a character's name be present in official translations, the Wiki will go by whichever name is used the most. Note that, regardless of quantity and acceptance elsewhere, official translations have a much higher precedence over fan translations.

Rei Idumi
We will be referring to her as "Rei Idumi" whenever necessary since that is allegedly what she requests her name to be romanized as, despite her name appearing as "Rei Izumi" in the Legend of the Twilight manga.

Non .hack trivia
We generally avoid mentioning specific series outside of .hack if we can. If a certain quote or character is a reference or homage to a non-.hack series, we will include that. However, we will not include every series any staff member has worked on. This is mainly for fairness and to avoid lengthy, irrelevant lists. There are many databases out there that can tell you which series each voice actor has done, and .hack//Wiki is not one of them; when it comes to a voice actor's shared roles, we will only include those within the .hack universe.