Battlestar Wiki:Standards and Conventions
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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.
Spelling
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.
Character Names
Characters should be refered to by both first and last name the first time they are mentioned in an article and then by the last name only every time after.
When neccessary, characters sharing the same last name should both be introduced in the same manner, but then referred to by their first name, rather than their last name, in order to disambiguate them. On a character's own page, they may be referred to by their last name and all others with the same last name by their first name, but this is not mandatory.
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. The only exception is that on their own bio pages, they get precedent to their last name. When Saul and Ellen don't shown up in the same article, the one that does, of course, gets to be "Tigh".
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). 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.
Numbers
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).
Images
Pictures 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 here. Bear in mind that Battlestar Wiki already hosts a large selection of images - try to find something appropriate from what's already been uploaded before uploading a new image.