How to Edit Wheel of Time Book Articles

The main purpose of TarValon.Net's Library has been to be a source of information on The Wheel of Time Book Series. The Library houses many articles, all of which have been submitted by members of the community, and are therefore also maintained by volunteers.

It is generally expected of Library editors to keep a consistent article structure, to edit the copy in a consistent manner, and include book and chapter references when needed.

For the consistency of the copy, it is required to use the TarValon.Net Library Manual of Style. How to MediaWiki Code explains how to write wiki code for some of the most common elements.

Layout, Headings, and Hierarchy

The content on each page is usually split into different sections. The page structure varies between types of pages, since there are pages that have to do with characters, and some that have to do with locations; there are chapter and book summaries, which also have their own structure.

Each section independent of what type of page it is on, is of a level two heading, and therefore should be written in title case. If a section has sub sections, they will be of level three heading, and will also be written in title case.

This hierarchy is needed to create a logical table of contents on the top of each page, but it also helps for better readability.

General Types of Layout

There are several types of layouts of an article's contents, which depend on the subject of the article. The most common layouts are included in the Manual of Style/Article Layout.

It is advised to follow the manual about layout, but there might be cases where not enough information is available for a certain subject, which would lead to some sections being unused, and therefore being redundant.

In cases where a character or location needs an additional section or subsection, not included in the manual about article layout, it would not be considered as going against the manual, therefore can be freely included.

Text Formatting

There are several text formatting rules that have been found to be mostly used throughout the Wheel of Time book articles.

The first time the title of an article appears in the text, it should be bolded.

There are words that should always be italicized and some that should always be capitalized, all of them are written in the Manual of Style/Wheel of Time Words and Phrases.

Templates

All Library templates can be found in the Category:Templates.

There are several different types of templates that are used in the TarValon.Net Library when writing or editing Wheel of Time book articles.

General

The following template can be used on different types of pages whenever it is needed to input a warning of spoilers: {{BookSpoilers}}

Character Templates

The following template is useful when the book character has a corresponding TV series character that needs its own page. This will render a navigation with two tabs at the top of the page, one tab leading to the book page, and the other to the television series page of that character.

{{BookArticleNav|[[Character Name|Book]]|[[Character Name (TV Series)|TV show]]}}

This template is a new one and it does not yet exist on many pages yet. To use it, follow the instructions below:

{{BookCharacterInfo
|CharacterImage=link to an image, if left blank it will show a default image
|altText=text on what the image shows
|Name=Name of Character
|Nationality=Nationality of Character
|Affiliation=Aes Sedai, Warder, Band of the Red Hand, etc.
|Ajah=If the affiliation is anything else than Aes Sedai, this field will not render
|SocialStatus=Noble
|Family=Characters that are related
|FirstAppearance={{teotw2|Chapter 2}} template that renders the chapter where the character first appears
}}

Chapter Templates

After every fact written in an article, it is required to include a reference. The references in the Library are usually put inline, after the fact they support. The reference consists of the book that it is taken from and the chapter number, linking to the corresponding chapter summary in the Library.

All chapter template variants and how to use them, are described in the Manual of Style/Citations.

All chapter templates can be found under the Category:Chapter Templates.

Companion Templates

It was decided back when the Wheel of Time Companion came out that copying information directly from it, will not be included in the Library. Therefore, we add different types of templates to Wheel of Time articles, that have to do with information within the Companion.

The types of templates and their usage is described in the Manual of Style/Citations.

All of the Companion templates can be found in the Category:Companion Templates

Categories

Each article in the Library should have a category. The categories should be placed at the bottom of the article following the main text of the article.

All Wheel of Time books related categories are included in the Categories (The Wheel of Time). If it is uncertain where an article should be categorized, contact the Historians or the Director of Research and Records. More information can be found here How to Request Edits to an Article.

Writing a New Article

In case of submitting a new article to the Library, the category "New Article" should be included to all other categories, so that the article can be reviewed (if it has not been done before in case of submitting through email).

Submitting Changes

After finishing editing an existing article, or submitting a new article, a short summary of the changes should be written in the Summary field, where applicable. Some appropriate summaries of minor changes include "Fixing a typo", "Adding a category", or "Changing a template". If multiple changes of different sort that cannot be summarized are made, then the summary may be skipped.

Questions about this article or anything else in the Library Manual, may be emailed to the Director of Research and Records at library@tarvalon.net.