VRCWiki:Manual of Style

This Manual of Style (MoS or MOS) is a suggested style manual for the VRChat Wiki.

In general:

• All content on the VRChat Wiki should be truthful and accurate.
• Contributors should write articles using straightforward, succinct, easily understood language and structure articles with consistent, reader-friendly layouts and formatting.
• If you have any questions about style, layout, or formatting the VRChat Wiki, contact one of the Wiki Moderators for help.

A few specific guidelines for style are detailed below:

Article titles

A title should be a recognizable name or description of the topic, balancing the criteria of being natural, sufficiently precise, concise, and consistent with those of related articles.

For formatting guidance see the Article title format section, noting the following:

• Capitalize the initial letter, but otherwise follow sentence case. VRChat uses sentence case for sentences, article titles, section titles, table headers, image captions, list entries (in most cases), and entries in infoboxes and similar templates, among other things.
• Do not use articles (a, an, or the) as the first word (VRChat Creator Economy, not The VRChat Creator Economy), unless it is an inseparable part of a name (The Black Cat) or title of a work (The VRChat Times).
• Normally use nouns or noun phrases: Early life, not In early life. Phrases such as In early life are acceptable (though not required) as section headings. They are also used frequently as part of longer article titles such as VRChat Events, especially when a shorter construction (Events) may have ambiguity issues.
• The final character should not be punctuation unless it is an inseparable part of a name (such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), or an abbreviation (VRChat Inc.), or when a closing round bracket or quotation mark is required (Fantastic Avatars (and where to find them)).
• Whenever quotation marks or apostrophes appear, add a redirect for the same title using apostrophes. Avoid use of curly quotes ("smart quotes") because straight quotation marks and apostrophes are easier to type and display reliably on most platforms.

English word choice and Capitalization

In order to make localization of the wiki content easier in the long run, consider a few style choices such as these:

• Quotations, titles of works (books, films, etc.)' should be capitalized as given in the source (but see Typographic conformity, below);
• Proper names use the subject's own spelling and capitalization, e.g., "...joint project of VRChat Inc. and VRChat Community Labs..."; "International Avatar Federation"
• Generally, do not capitalize the word the in mid-sentence: throughout the United Kingdom, not throughout The United Kingdom.
• Use universally accepted terms rather than those less widely distributed, especially in titles. For example, "glasses" is preferred to the national varieties spectacles (British English) and eyeglasses (American English); "Ten million" is preferable to "one crore" (Indian English).
• If a variant spelling appears in a title, make a redirect page to accommodate the others, as with "artefact" and "artifact", so that all variants can be used in searches and linking.
• Use a commonly understood word or phrase in preference to one that has a different meaning because of national differences (rather than "alternate", use "alternative" or "alternating", as appropriate), except in technical contexts where such substitution would be inappropriate ("alternate reality"; "alternate universe").