Brickwiki:Conventions

BrickWiki conventions are finalized on this page, after discussion on this page's discussion page. These conventions are designed to create uniformity on this wiki and to simplify creating, locating, and linking to articles. You may also be interested in the BrickWiki Guidelines.

General editing

Article Titles

• All articles should be titled in the lowercase, unless the topic they describe has a specific capitalization scheme.
• All article titles should favour the singular form over the plural form whenever possible.
• For LEGO products the rule of thumb is to include the word LEGO only if fans regularly include LEGO (or it's initial letter) when referring to the product. For example, LEGO Digital Designer is commonly referred to as LDD, but the Technic theme is not commonly referred to LEGO Technic.

Spelling

• Articles about The LEGO Company/Group should follow UK naming convention as this is used in international TLC press releases.
• Articles specific to a country, or referring to a named object in a country should follow that countries spelling convention. eg. One might collect American or Australian Programs but would collect UK Programmes, one would capitalise Canberra but capitalize Washington DC.
• All other articles must follow the convention set by the first author. An article on Centre of Gravity would follow UK spelling, whereas one on Center of Gravity would follow US spelling.
• Nomenclature should follow the same rules as spelling but placing a descriptive bracket is advised eg. lorry (truck)
• If you are unsure of the correct spelling of a word, add a comment to the article talk page.
• If the article title itself is subject to variant spelling, the choice of the first author of the article shall prevail, but a redirect from the other spelling to the article should be created (as soon as someone notices).
• BrickWiki should be spelled with a capital "W".

Citations

• The standard way to give a list of external references is ==External References== with subsection headers below if applicable
• Footnotes can be obtained by including "{{fn|X}}" in the text and "{{fnb|X}}" at the end of the text where X can be any character (usually numbers in order of first appearance in the document). You may want to put a divider line ("----") at the bottom of the article and put the "{{fnb|X}}" tags below it.
• It is best practise to included external links in the document itself where topical, or in the external references section, rather than relegating them to a footnote.

Dimensions and Measurement

• All measurements which require the use of either metric or Imperial measurements should favour metric units.
• It would be helpful, but is not required, to keep Imperial measurements in parenthesis immediately after the metric measurement.
• Measurements of building bricks should be given in terms of studs and bricks followed by other measurements (ie:LDUs ) in brackets. The LDU article has a details and a conversion table for those who are unsure of how to use them.

Linking

• It is considered good practise to crosslink only once per article (or per large section for large articles) to any single other article. Thus only the first instance of a term would be crosslinked, with subsequent appearances left as plain text.
• Common sense should be used here though and if an editor believes a second link would add to the article then they should certainly feel free to add one.

Referring to adult LEGO users

• It is up to the editor of an article to choose whether or not to use AFOL or ALE to refer to adult users of LEGO. Unlike spelling it is up to each editor to use as they see fit however the first use of a term should always be wikified through the double square brackets (eg. [[ALE]]).
• The one exception is when referring to a specific person (such as in people articles) in which case that persons preferred term (if known) should be used.

Referring to LEGO sets

• When referring to official LEGO sets the form should be Set titles (Set number) as used by LEGO. For example Airport Shuttle (6399)
• In the case of articles about identical sets with different names (ie: European vs North American releases) or different set numbers (ie: Legends) the editor shall determine which title to use and shall establish a re-direct from the alternate.

Set Lists

There are many excellent databases that provide set lists for every theme including Brickset, Peeron and BrickLink. Duplication of such lists on BrickWiki is discouraged. An easy method of linking to these resources is provided by the Set List template which will create a sub heading and formatted table within an article.

BrickWiki organisation

Clone Brands

Please note, the majority of this site is predominately centred around LEGO brand bricks. There is a special section for Clone brands and all articles about non-LEGO brands should be placed in the relevant category or sub-category.

Category descriptions

It is common practise here to leave category articles with a brief description of the category and a link to an article with more depth (if needed) and vice-versa. Thus the space category links to the space article and vice-versa. The article should also be included in the category so that space contains the line [[category:space]] at the end.

Theme categorisation

Due to the somewhat layered nature of LEGO themes, it is encouraged that articles about subthemes be categorised under their main theme, rather than the generic themes category. Thus an article about Blacktron whould be placed in [[category:space]] rather than [[category:themes]].

Characters

Character names from LEGO sets, video games or other media shall redirect to the appropriate theme or other appropriate article unless said character is significant to fans in some fashion as an independent element (eg Timmy, Captain Redbeard).

Images

External Images

Please be aware that linking to external images can be quite rude and potentially illegal (unless you both host and own the copyright of the image) and as such should be avoided. If you wish to link to an image on Brickshelf, please use ImageBoxBrickshelf. If you need to link to an external image not on Brickshelf, please use the ImageBoxExt template so that the image can be brought 'in house' in future with relative ease.

Accessible Images

In order to help make this site more accessible for visually impaired users, we have created a set of guidelines to aid in the creation of accessible images. These can be found at BrickWiki:Accessible Images.

NB. Following these guidelines is preferable and will maximise potential users of the image but it is not neccessary, please do not feel that you cannot add a picture if it does not match these guidelines.