The Manual of Style (MoS) is an editing guideline accepted by all users editing the Forza Wiki, and is utilized to maintain a consistently high-quality across all of our articles.
Any and all articles that fall below, or damage the quality standards set by the Forza Wikia, will be removed. Articles that have had work put into their development to meet these standards, but fall short by only a few minor factors must be marked with a {{Cleanup}} template.
Discussion of an article's content or quality should take place on their respective talk page.
General
Language
- Point of View: All articles must be written in third person, and from an unbiased stand point free of a subjective viewpoint.
- Spelling: All article content must be written in American English as this is an English wiki.
- Content that is of another language in game, such as manufacturer terms or locations, should be written in the language used.
- Tense: Article content should be written in present tense with regards to game content.
- Past tense may be used for highlighting game content releases or content that is no longer available in the form of an addendum.
(i.e. The February Jalopnik Car Pack for Forza Horizon is a six vehicle car pack released on February 5, 2013. It was removed from the Xbox Live Marketplace on October 20th, 2016.) - Past tense may be used for historical content regarding real life aspects of vehicles, people, companies, or locations.
(i.e. The 2005 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren is a grand tourer developed by both Mercedes-Benz and McLaren. It was in production from 2003 to 2009, followed by the roadster model in 2010, and sold until the Surry based factory produced 3,500 units.) - Future tense should never be used due to the number of articles and difficulties with tracking appropriate moments to alter tense of content.
- Past tense may be used for highlighting game content releases or content that is no longer available in the form of an addendum.
- Offensive or vulgar language is strongly prohibited on the Forza Wikia.
Formatting
Capitalisation: Capital letters are used for title cases, names, and locations. If a trademark (e.g. quattro) uses lower cases, it should also be reflected in this manner in any articles. All caps should be avoided.
- Italics: Italics should be used for game titles, artists, magazines, websites, and named vehicles as they are major works of art and/or publications.
(i.e. Forza Motorsport, April Top Gear Car Pack, AMC Rebel "The Machine".)- However, italics that are present in an article should not be included in the article's title to avoid search confusion.
- Bold: Bold text should only be used for table headers and captions. You may also use boldface for the first occurrence of the title in an article and to highlight text on lists. It shouldn't be used for emphasising in articles, it should rather be reflected by your choice of words.
- Linking: Each article of the Forza Wiki must be linked to another relevant article.
- Any links to another article should be used once; regardless of how many instances of the initially linked content is mentioned.
- Multiple links to the same article may only be used for lists, tables, or to avoid reader confusion.
- Links may be created leading to articles that have not been created yet, but only if they follow a thought out or planned route of content expansion.
- Piped links should be used for links with long names that do not need the entire name to be mentioned, and avoid entirely rewriting a link name to not mess with the search engine, unless a corresponding redirect page exists.
(i.e. Motorsport All-Stars Car Pack instead of Forza Horizon 3/Motorsport All-Stars Car Pack).
- Abbreviations: Articles are not limited to a specific word count, but abbreviations are required under certain circumstances to minimize space used for tables, mobile viewing, and consistency;
- Talk Pages: Every edit on a talk page must be signed with a signature stamp as shown here: ~~~~
Articles
Structure
- Always use a game title prefix for overview articles and all respective subpages. It should always look like this: Forza Horizon 3/Downloadable Content. Further subpages from subpages should not use two prefixes as the article name would get too big. In this case, only use the game title prefix again.
- Titles should always reflect the terminology used by the game they appear in. Content across multiple games that use slightly different terminology should redirect to an overview article if not expressing a specific game.
| Experience Board (redirect) | > | Boards (Overview) |
> | Discount Signs |
| Bonus Board (redirect) | > | > | Forza Horizon 2/Bonus Boards | |
| Reward Board (redirect) | > | > | Forza Horizon 3/Bonus Boards |
Content
- Relevance: Every edit made and media content added must be relevant to the Forza Motorsport or Forza Horizon series.
- Content should not relate to or link to any other racing game wikia sites.
- Barred content:
- Opinions
- Advertisements, speculation, or rumor
- Information about third-party hacks, game modifications, or exploits
- Article duplicates
- Polls
- Trivia: Trivial information must be written or put under a "Trivia" headline.
- Trivia content should involve an aspect of the content the article pertains to that is not obvious
- User Tests: Experimentation and testing should not be performed in articles, but only in a user's own Sandbox page.
- Copyrighted content: Content that has been copied and pasted directly from a source will be removed.
- The usage of ingame content on the Forza Wikia must be done in a transformative manner, as in content can not be directly copied from the game and should be altered to highlight this site is not in any official capacity involved with the Forza brand.
Quality
- Length: Articles that are too short or contain content that is not helpful will be removed.
- Placeholder: Articles that contain the correct usage of templates and article structure, but have very little useful content will be removed.
- Cleanup: Articles with a {{Cleanup}} template may be considered for deletion and re-creation for ease of quality improvement.
Referencing
- Every bit of information added to the wiki must be verifiable, as such thing is expected from any encyclopedia. Content that doesn't have an adequate reference will be removed. The following must always be followed by a reference:
- Development differences including pre-release content
- Information that usually cannot be observed during normal gameplay
- Real world-based content
- Quotes from characters, in-game menus, etc.
- Questionable or rumoured content
- Allowed references:
- Publisher website, twitter or facebook feed
- Developer website, twitter or facebook feed
- Manufacturer website, twitter or facebook feed
- Sponsor website, twitter or facebook feed
- Credable vehicle encyclopedia websites
- Prima Official Strategy Guides
- Game Industry news sites such as Kotaku, Joystiq or Gamasutra
- Development Staff forum posts
- Clear and high quality youtube videos
- Images expressing aspect or point of reference
- Barred references:
- Forum posts by non-development team members
- Images highlighting mod, bug, exploit or 'Hack' usage
- External website without a credible information source
- References can be added by placing <ref>websiteofreference.co.uk</ref> next to the statement and <references> at the base of the article.
- To improve navigation, add the type of reference and the subject of it:
- Example: <ref>Web link: websiteofreference.co.uk Website of reference< /ref>
- To improve navigation, add the type of reference and the subject of it:
Categories
- Every article must be linked with a category. To do so, simply insert [[Category:Name of category]] at the bottom of the article or use the category bar on the right editing console.
- Naming: Category names must be capitalized and contain as few words as possible so that articles with a high number of categories won't look cluttered.
- Example: Events in Forza Motorsport 4 -> Events (FM4), Cars in Forza Horizon 3 -> Cars (FH3).
Media
Naming
- All uploaded content must have an effective name to allow for easier searching and to keep related content together.
- A example of this is "File:FH3_Ford_17XboxFalconFGX.jpg" as it highlights the game, make, and vehicle that the image relates to.
- Users that upload a personal image for either their signature templates, blog, or user page must include their username in the image filename.
Audio
- No audio content is currently allowed on articles.
Images
- Relevance: Article images should not be purely decorative and must be relevant to the article, as well as highlight the subject.
- Disallowed Images: The following images are not allowed as well as those highlighted by Wikipedia's Image Policy;
- Images taken with a camera
- Images with a watermark
- Images of degraded quality (too dark, too small, blurry, hidden, etc.)
- Images taken at poor graphic settings (PC titles)
- Images with the intent of advertising (Fan sites, modification sites, social network sites or "clan" sites.
- Note: Images depicting pre-release content from upcoming titles are exempt from this rule, as long as they are used for referencing.
- Recommended Quality: All images on the Forza Wiki should meet the following quality standards whenever possible:
- All images relating to games must be in a widescreen format (16:9).
- All images must be at least 1280x720 (0.9 Mpx) resolution but not above 1920x1080 (20.7 Mpx).
- Icons must be of a square resolution - 32x32, 64x64, etc.
- All images must be of a square pixel aspect ratio.
- Larger images must be in a .jpg format due to their low file size and an audience majority of mobile viewership.
- Images captured using an Xbox DVR function are allowed, but smaller file size .jpg images are preferred over larger file size .png images.
- Icon images must be in a .png format with a transparent background (alpha channel).
- Images that have been uploaded but not have not been placed into an article or user page will be deleted, unless they are linked.