Battlestar Wiki:Standards and Conventions

This page is one of Battlestar Wiki's many projects. This page serves to coordinate discussion on a particular aspect of this Wiki. The formal recommendations of a project may be treated as policies.

This page serves as the central hub for standards used in writing articles on Battlestar Wiki. Initially, it will probably consist of a lot of gesturing and debating on the talk page. Once a reasonable approximation of consensus is achieved on a topic, information about it will be moved here. Feel free to bring up new convention questions on the talk page.

This page is not designed to supercede other Project Pages. Some over-lap is expected, but project-specific standards and conventions should be moved to their project page, if one exists or a page created for a project, if one does not.

HTML vs. Wiki Code

HTML is allowed to be used, but if you can, please use the Wiki code. Wiki code is faster and if everything is in Wikicode, everything can change if a format or style changes. Then we will not have to re-edit all the pages during a huge update.

Spelling and Numbers

Prefer the American spellings of words as much as possible. This is arbitrary, but a call had to be made.

Use "the Twelve Colonies" or "the Colonies" rather than "the 12 Colonies" as it is the name of a sovereign government like "the United States." Likewise, "Colonial" should always be capitalized thusly, although "colony" remains uncapitalized for the same reason we do not capitalize "state" when referring to one of the United States.

Numbers should use a period (.) for decimal places and a comma (,) for marking every three digits (e.g. 3,600 or 54,345,277). For ease of reading, such use of commas is encouraged. Numbers less than 11 should generally be written out long hand (i.e. seven, not 7).

Character Names

Characters should be introduced with both first and last name the first time they are mentioned in an article. Subsequent referalls may abbreviate to the last name. Never use only the first name when the last name is known (ie, "Kara Thrace" or "Thrace", but never "Kara").

There are two currently active characters who share the same last name: Bill and Lee Adama; and Saul and Ellen Tigh. It is often tempting to refer to Lee and Ellen by their first names, and (Bill) Adama and (Saul) Tigh by their last. At the battlestar wiki, we find this somewhat condescending.

Where neccessary, characters sharing the same last name should both be introduced using full names, and may subsequently be referred to with first names. For example, in a single article, Ellen Tigh and Saul Tigh should be introduced thusly. Every time after that, they should be Ellen and Saul, respectively. When Saul and Ellen don't shown up in the same article, the one that does, of course, gets to be "Tigh".

The only exception is that on a character's own page, they have precedent to their last name. All others with the same last name may be referred to by their first name.

Other acceptable means for disambiguation include rank (Commander Adama vs. Captain Adama) and callsign (Adama vs. "Apollo"). Callsigns are appropriate for summaries and military data, but not for biographies.

Character Titles

Members of the Quorum of Twelve should be referred to as delegates, not representatives. Although the show uses both terms, the "delegate" appears to be the formal title.

Ships

Ship names should be italicized (e.g. Galactica). Military ships generally receive no article (i.e. "Galactica" not "the Galactica") and civilian ships generally do receive an article (i.e. "the Rising Star" not "Rising Star"). There are some exceptions to this (e.g. Colonial One, Cloud 9) – usually, ship names ending in a number do not receive an article. Italicization of ship names includes the possesive marker and other endings added to a ship's name (e.g. Galactica's, not Galactica's), but not articles. Mostly, ships are female and so use of "she" and "her" is encouraged, though not mandated.

When discussing Vipers, use of either "Mark" or "Mk." is acceptable, though "mk." is just sloppy. Also, roman numerals are preferred. Thus, "Viper Mark II" or "Viper Mk. VII" but not "Viper mk. 2".

Verb Tense

In almost every case, the present tense should be used when relating events occuring in an episode (e.g. Baltar shoots Crashdown in the back in order to save Cally's life). This is in line with the traditional style used to discuss literary works of fiction and the reasons it is employed for those kinds of articles entirely apply here.

Exceptions can be made for articles dealing with historical events, where present tense can impede narrative flow. Typically, a historical event involves situations that occur prior to the Miniseries. "Flashback" scenes in episodes should be treated as historical events. "Thrace cried at Zak's funeral" is appropriate since this event occurs two years before the MiniSeries, although we see the event in a flashback scene in "Act of Contrition".

Links to Episodes

When referring to episodes in text, use quote marks. This helps keep them distinct from other text. This is especially useful for unwieldly episode name such as "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part I".

• Example: "In the episode "Pegasus", Galactica finds Pegasus."

When using an episode to cite a source, use parenthesis with no quotes. Citations go inside punctuation.

• Example: "Galactica finds Pegasus (Pegasus)."

Signing Your Work

Don't. Battlestar Wiki is a collaboration of many writers. Be proud of your contributions, but do not take ownership of articles. Signatures will be removed without debate.

Images

All episode screenshots are copyright Universal Studios, and should be credited as such on image pages.

Images are desirable wherever their use is appropriate. Character pictures are currently being handled on the Battlestar Wiki:Characters project. Other articles needing images are listed at Battlestar Wiki:Requested Images.

Quote of the Day

Quotes for the Quote of the Day should all conform to this standard. In all cases, the naming conventions should agree with Character Names, above. The first occurances of all character and ship names within quotes should be linked. Pronouns (you, he, it) may be linked to clarify who or what the speaker is refering to. Linking of other words (jargon, etc.) is also left to a matter of discretion. All episode names should, of course, be linked.

For one-line quotes, the quote should appear first, enclosed in double-quotes with normal weighting and no italics (except to show emphasis). It should be followed with a hard line break (<br/>). This Wiki strives to be valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, which means all tags, including br tags, must be closed. We don't want to break anything, now do we? The following line should begin with a double en-dash (--) followed directly by the rank or position of the character being quoted, then their name. These should be non-italics and normally weighted, as well. Finally, the episode name, in italics, should appear in parenthasis after a space.

"The line, in normal-weighted text, enclosed in double quotes."<br/>

--Rank and Name in Normal (Episode Name)

This will end up looking thus:

"Ladies and gentlemen, please. Please. We are in a laboratory. There are hazardous chemical compounds everywhere. That--that's a thermo-nuclear bomb, for frak's sake, so..."

--Dr. Gaius Baltar (Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down)

For quotes longer than one line, each utterance will appear on its own line. The speaker's rank or position and name should appear followed by a colon (:) first. All of this should be bold. The actual line follows, in normal weighted font, followed by a hard line break (<br/>). Subsequent utterences by the same speaker should begin simply with the character's name, as layed out in Character Names, above. After the final utterance of the quote, the episode name should appear in italics, prefaced by a double en-dash (--).

Rank and Name 1: Humorous battle banter aimed at Speaker 2.<br/>

Rank and Name 2: Scathing insult.<br/>

Name 1: Pithy retort.<br/>

--Episode Name

For example:

Captain Lee Adama: Hey, how about you, Boomer? Doc tells me you're holding up better than anybody in the squadron.<br\>

Lieutenant Sharon Valerii: I'm tired, like everybody else.<br\>

Adama: You never seem it.<br\>

Lieutenant Kara Thrace: 'Cause she's a Cylon.<br\>

Valerii: You're just gonna make me come over there and kick your ass, aren't you?<br\>

--33

Note: All quotes should go in the Quotes namesapce in this format: Quotes:MM DD

Disambiguation

Because the various Battlestar Galactica series re-use ships, character names, episode titles and other terminology, it is occasionally necessary to write articles covering the same thing in different continuities.

When this is the case, an individual article should be used for each series. Articles should be namespaced according to the following schema:

• (TOS) - Original series
• (RDM) - Re-imagined series
• (Video Game) - 2003 Video Game
• (1980) - Galactica 1980
• (SDS) - Singer/DeSanto continuation
• (SC) - Richard Hatch's "Second Coming" attempt

The non-namespaced article should serve as a disambiguation page, pointing to the related articles.

Examples of this in use are:

• Pegasus (TOS) vs. Pegasus (RDM) (disambiguation at Pegasus)
• Adama (TOS) vs. William Adama vs. Lee Adama (disambiguation at Adama)

Pages for characters that appear in more than one series should reserve the name in common for disambiguation (Cf. Adama, Baltar, etc.), but individual pages need not be tagged with the series name if there is sufficient information in the title otherwise so as to be disambiguous (Cf. Gaius Baltar vs. Baltar (TOS) or William Adama vs. Adama (TOS)).

For pages that are children, so to speak, of a disambiguation page, a note should be applied at the top of the page (before everything, even the character template, etc.) linking back to the disambiguation page. This note should be preceded by a single tab and be in all italics.

Questions Section

Every episode-synopsis article includes a section called "Questions". The idea behind the section is, "These are the questions this episode raises and does not answer by itself." Since these pages are encyclopedic, it is not intended that the "Questions" section be used to actually speculate as to the answers!

So, the rule of thumb should be:

1. If a question is raised and not answered in the episode, it belongs in the Questions section on the encylopedic page.
2. If a question is added to the encyclopedic page, and someone else realises it's actually answered in the same episode, it might make sense to add the answer after the question, but it probably makes more sense to move both the question and the answer to the Talk page, because it isn't really an unanswered question. If it's an ambiguous or obscure item that keeps coming up (or seems likely to), then it might belong in "Analysis" or "Notes".
3. If a question is answered in a later episode, the analysis for that episode should note that the event hearkens back to an earlier open plot point, and perhaps the original page should be edited to point forward to the answer, but the answer itself should not be edited into the page for the episode that posed the question. An early example of this style appears on the encylopedia page for the episode "Water", "Why do the Cylons want to keep Helo on Caprica?".
4. Debates and discussion have no place on the encylopedic pages; only on the talk pages. Encyclopedic pages should be neutral-point-of-view and descriptive. So if there's any dispute over whether a question belongs where it's been placed or how it's being handled, the whole thing should be moved over to the talk page and hashed out there.