Yugipedia talk:Manual of style

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Started

I know a lot of the stuff here hasn't been discussed, but it's to the best of my knowledge what is used in official material or >90% of the time in official material. If anyone thinks there's anything wrong, please say so here. -- Deltaneos (talk) 22:08, July 26, 2010 (UTC)

I like this page
but shouldn't these lines be different?

• Correct: Chazz said that cards are "weapons."
• Incorrect: Chazz said that cards are "weapons."

-Falzar FZ- (talk page|useful stuff) 06:48, July 27, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, corrected. Thanks. -- Deltaneos (talk) 12:09, July 27, 2010 (UTC)

On the subject of logical v traditional punctuation, the English manga seems to favour traditional. e.g. Come by yourself to Room "C." and As the "Master," I make the rules. But for exclamation marks, they sometimes put them in the quotes and sometimes don't. e.g. This is an Ancient Chinese game called "Dragon Cards"! and A sinister class-mate challenges Yugi to a magical game of "Dragon Cards!" The latter of which is wrong even in traditional punctuation. -- Deltaneos (talk) 12:29, July 27, 2010 (UTC)

Slightly confusing... maybe it's just be the preference of the illustrator, and not how it's really meant to be. -Falzar FZ- (talk page|useful stuff) 13:11, July 27, 2010 (UTC)

I infinitely prefer logical punctuation, so I'm quite happy to see that's what's being suggested for the wiki-wide standard. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000} 20:53, July 28, 2010 (UTC)

Just checking, which one do we use? e.g.

Activate "Rescue Cat's" Effect.

Activate "Rescue Cat's" effect.

Activate "Rescue Cat"'s Effect.

Activate "Rescue Cat"'s effect.

I've seen each of those used on the tips pages, I just haven't changed them since I wasn't certain. (currently, when I'm adding my own tip, I tend to use the 2nd one). -Falzar FZ- (talk page|useful stuff) 13:11, July 27, 2010 (UTC)

"Effect" should be lowercase anyway. Some rulings such as "Simorgh, Bird of Ancestry's" put the 's inside the quotation marks. I think in actual card lores they just try to avoid these situations by saying the effect of "Rescue Cat" instead. See "Gravekeeper's Stele" for example. -- Deltaneos (talk) 18:34, July 28, 2010 (UTC)

I would say it'd be best for us to do the same thing, then. Why wade through the whole issue when there's already a neat, clean way to sidestep it entirely? 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000} 20:53, July 28, 2010 (UTC)

BC VS B.C.

Considering "Machine King - 3000 B.C. uses "B.C." should we make that the default? The only other time I'm aware of BC/B.C. being used in the newspaper in ""The Man from Egypt (Part 1)"", which uses "BC". I personally prefer "BC" to "B.C.", but shouldn't a card be more influential than a minor detail from an old chapter of the manga? -- Deltaneos (talk) 19:03, November 15, 2010 (UTC)

I actually prefer "B.C." as I'm used to having abbreviations using "." at the end of each... abbreviated part. (e.g. etc.) -Falzar FZ- (talk page|useful stuff) 21:55, November 15, 2010 (UTC)

Set names

The Konami website nearly always puts set names in italics. Shall we go ahead and make that recommended style here? -- Deltaneos (talk) 12:14, May 16, 2011 (UTC)

This reminds me whether we should bold every card name because Konami does it. Or if we should just follow the formatting of all our other pages. -Falzar FZ- (talk page|useful stuff) 12:43, May 16, 2011 (UTC)

I changed {{Card table set}} some time ago to italicize set names instead of bolding them, and I've been changing hardcoded bolding to italics (or adding italics to the bolding, as appropriate) as I come across them while editing and can be bothered to do so. Really, I don't see this as being much different from using quotes on card names or episode and chapter titles, to tell the truth. And I much prefer quoting card names to bolding them, Falzar, but maybe that's just me (though they are usually quoted when mentioned in card effects/lores). =D 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 18:10, May 16, 2011 (UTC)

Bolding cards names is not a good idea, even if Konami does it. That many things on a page being bolded would place emphasis in far too many places, which sort of defeats the purpose of using bold text to emphasize. Cheesedude (talk • contribs) 18:15, May 16, 2011 (UTC)

Since Yu-Gi-Oh! Official Card Game and Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game are given in italics, are the abbreviations OCG and TCG supposed to be in italics or not? -- Deltaneos (talk) 13:58, May 29, 2011 (UTC)

I've been putting them in italics, using the same logic that DM, GX and 5D's get italics. Cheesedude (talk • contribs) 18:38, May 29, 2011 (UTC)

Italics, quotation marks or not

There's a few terms that I'm wondering if they should or shouldn't use italics or quotation marks.

• Duel Puzzles like "Destroy Zera!". It seems right that they should use quotation marks, but I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe because shorter works of art like episodes and chapters use quotation marks and these could be viewed as the shorter works to video games.
• The game Dragon Cards. Games like Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game or Dungeons and Dragons go in italics, but traditional games like chess or Senet don't. In reality Dragon Cards isn't a traditional game, but in-series it's a thousands of years old game.
• Card's attack and effect names. Again, quotation marks just seems right, but I'm not sure why.
• Character's abilities, such as Parasite Mind and Foresee Draw. Not sure if these should be quotes or neither. Slightly inclined to go for neither.

The English manga (Yu-Gi-Oh! (Duelist/Millennium World) and Yu-Gi-Oh! GX at least) isn't a great source for checking the last three. There's a lot of stuff that obviously should be but isn't quoted, italicised in it and it often uses italics for emphasis and quotes when introducing a new or unusual term. The Japanese 5D's manga at least properly uses quotes around card names sometimes. I'm not sure how it handles attack/effect names. -- Deltaneos (talk) 23:23, May 29, 2011 (UTC)

• Makes sense to me.
• I'd go with no, but that one has no right answer based on what you've said of it.
• Quotations do seem right here, though it causes confusion.
• No. It's confusing enough with card names getting quotes and actual quotations getting quotes.

Cheesedude (talk • contribs) 00:46, May 30, 2011 (UTC)

Sorry I'm late to the party, I'm still playing catch-up with my email. Yes, I'm only now up to May 29-30. I pretty much agree with Cheesedude. Dragon Cards doesn't seem to have any obvious, direct real-world influences, so we can probably ignore that and look at how it's treated in-universe (rather nebulous reasoning, but there you go). Are there any card lores that feature attack names, or is it always oblique references? 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 04:49, June 6, 2011 (UTC)

Yes, but all of those are Normal Monsters, so ALL the text is in italics. Cheesedude (talk • contribs) 15:18, June 6, 2011 (UTC)

I think he was saying to check for quotation marks there rather than italics.

Card lores usually talk about them as if they are real monsters, rather than cards, so don't use gameplay-style punctuation. e.g. "Elemental HERO Avian" mentions his attack name and doesn't use quotation marks, but doesn't use them for "Elemental Hero" either. Incidentally "Flame Manipulator" puts his attack names in quotation marks (but not on the Japanese card). -- Deltaneos (talk) 15:26, June 6, 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I wasn't thinking about the fact that Normal Monsters' lores are already italicized - not sure why it slipped my mind. Regardless, it doesn't look like they're much in the way of resolving this for us, so for completely arbitrary aesthetic-related reasons, I'm with the both of you on using quotes for attack names. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 16:17, June 6, 2011 (UTC)

Actually, Cheesedude was against using quotes for them and I'm just not sure which way is better. -- Deltaneos (talk) 16:52, June 6, 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, mistook his comments on characters' abilities names for his comment on attack names. -- Deltaneos (talk) 16:55, June 6, 2011 (UTC)

Monsters

Per card lore and the style guide, the word "monster" should not be capitalized when attached to a term such as "Armor" or "Toon", right? Then why do the articles for such things have it capitalized in their titles? Due to that I assumed that they always should have be in caps, and even informed a user they were doing it wrong when I was the one in error. Any objections to my moving those articles to lower-case. Cheesedude (talk • contribs) 22:49, September 4, 2011 (UTC)

Probably because we're used to seeing things like "Normal Monsters" on lores.

Cards use "Spirit monster", so I have no objections. -Falzar FZ- (talk page|useful stuff) 02:24, September 5, 2011 (UTC)

I'm in favour of the renaming. It seems to be how it's done in card texts. Konami used to use a capital "M" for such monsters, but have since changed to a lowercase one.

However there should be some other tedious update tasks that need to be done afterwards. Template:CardTable2 would need to be changed to point to the direct page names, since it automatically adds "Monster" to the end of type2 and type3, which could need either "monster" or "Monster" depending on what's entered. And SMW queries might break if they use [[Monster Type::Tuner Monster]] instead of [[Monster Type::Tuner monster]]. -- Deltaneos (talk) 02:25, September 5, 2011 (UTC)

Series and quotes

Since we are now not classifying non-supported archetypes as archetypes, do they get quotes or not? Cheesedude (talk • contribs) 04:21, September 16, 2011 (UTC)

I say "yes", simply because it's more confusing in the long run trying to make a distinction. 「ディノ奴千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 04:28, September 16, 2011 (UTC)

I'd say yes for ones connected by portions of names like "Monarch" or "Charmer", but not for ones like Egyptian God or Sacred Beast. -- Deltaneos (talk) 17:04, September 16, 2011 (UTC)

Bold quotes

I've noticed on Wikipedia for articles whose subject is usually given in quotation marks, e.g. a song title, it says not to bold the quotation marks around its name in the lead paragraph. i.e. use "'''name'''" instead of '''"name"'''. This is because the quotation marks aren't part of the name. It's usually been done it the other way here. Should we switch over? -- Deltaneos (talk) 16:11, October 5, 2011 (UTC)

I don't see why not - it could be seen as a parallel to our choice to use logical punctuation, for instance. 「ディノ奴千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 23:33, October 5, 2011 (UTC)

I never thought I would say this about a formatting issue, but honestly don't care. At all. Prepare your shelters. The end is near. Cheesedude (talk • contribs) 00:02, October 6, 2011 (UTC)

Possessives after s and apostrophes

What's the stance of forming possessives of words ending with "s"? Reading through style guides, what I gather is:

• Go by the sound, not the letter itself. e.g. treat Rex as if it was Recks and debris as if it was debree.
• If the word is a plural, its possessive uses s' e.g. cards becomes cards'.
• If the word ends with an ss sound, use s's e.g. goddess becomes goddess's.
• An abstract noun followed by sake uses s'. e.g. goodness' sake.
• If the words ends with one s sound, there are three different standards.
  1. Always use s'.
  2. Always use s's.
  3. Sometimes use s' and sometimes use s's. e.g. Jesus becomes Jesus', while Charles becomes Charles's. This is usually accompanied with the rule, "use whichever matches the pronunciation of the possessive", but that seems a bit redundant to me. Whatever rules determine the pronunciation are the rules that determine the spelling. I think it's that ancient names use s', while other words use s's.

For the last rule, judging by "Gottoms' Emergency Call", the TCG uses either the first or third standard. Should we be saying Jack Atlas' Decks or Jack Atlas's Decks, Tres' conviction or Tres's conviction. Does anyone know of any other cards named like this which could maybe narrow this down?

Looking at the second bullet, I seem to have messed-up with "The High Priestess'(s) Staff". "The High Priestess's Staff" seems to be grammatically correct. I think it should either be called "High Priestess's Staff" or "High Priestess Staff". -- Deltaneos (talk) 13:39, October 6, 2012 (UTC)

From the list of "All TCG/OCG/Anime/Manga cards" (because it's the longest up to date list I currently have already saved, so I don't need to wait for the queries to load), currently there are 40 hits for searching for "s'" in names and effects, and 0 hits for searching for "s's".

-Falzar FZ- (talk page|useful stuff) 14:07, October 6, 2012 (UTC)

Based on the options, ordering, and presentation, I'm guessing wikipedia:MOS:POSS is the main style guide you read? ;)

I think where reasonable, we should simply avoid the issue altogether by rewording to remove the possessive (as we already do for card names and other quoted nouns), but otherwise, I think Falzar's findings are informative. 「ディノ奴千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 18:52, October 6, 2012 (UTC)

Would it be okay if I asked which cards use the s'?

Yes, that is the main one I read.

I think there's going to be too many cases where we can't avoid it, particularly with page names; Alexis Rhodes' Decks, Atticus Rhodes' Decks, Dark Yugi and Deschutes' Duel, Jack Atlas' Decks, Jack Atlas' penthouse, Maximillion Pegasus' Decks, Pegasus' diary, Pegasus' KaibaCorp takeover attempt, Pegasus' sanctuary, Pegasus' videotape, Sartorius' motorcycle and Yami Yugi and Pegasus' TV Duel. It's just as well that we document a rule to deal with these.

Also, the manga says Pegasus's quite a bit, but it does not follow TCG standards, like with different capitalisation and traditional punctuation. -- Deltaneos (talk) 21:20, October 6, 2012 (UTC)

Hence why I said "where reasonable". ;) I personally have always been partial to just using the apostrophe without a trailing s, but I don't have anything other than personal preference to back that choice up with. 「ディノ奴千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 04:09, October 7, 2012 (UTC)

Ah yes, it's all in User:Falzar FZ/Sandbox10. Thanks. In the current version, Most are plural possessives and "Aggiba, the Malevolent Sh'nn S'yo" is irrelevant. That leaves us with:

• "Gottoms' Emergency Call"
• "Gradius' Option"
• "Horus' Servant"

So they're certainly not using the second standard above. Had they been using the third, would they not use "Gottoms's Emergency Call" or "Gradius's Option"? Being an Ancient name, Horus might be exempt. Although "Gottoms's Emergency Call" does sound very awkward, so even by the third standard, "Gottoms' Emergency Call" would be right.

Having for a long time assumed s' was always right, I too am inclined to go for it. Trying not to take that into account, "Gradius' Option" and the lack of any s's seem to suggest we should go with the second standard. Although it's not a huge amount of evidence. -- Deltaneos (talk) 21:54, October 15, 2012 (UTC)

Actually, now that you mention it, the list I referred to included Anime and Manga cards/effects. So the sandbox has less cards. But most of those anime/manga cards are translations.

Missed Harpies' Hunting Ground and Spiders' Lair. The High Priestess' Staff and Zeus' Breath for the anime/manga section.

Also, the count includes plural possessives, such as owners', players' and monsters', each time it was used.

-Falzar FZ- (talk page|useful stuff) 00:24, October 16, 2012 (UTC)

"Harpies'" and "Spiders'" are both plural possessives, so they don't really help out. I'm inclined to call a pattern based on the three Delt notes and the two anime/manga ones you add, Falzar. 「ディノ奴千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 01:11, October 16, 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure we can use "The High Priestess' Staff" as evidence. As far as I know, that page name has only been based on the Japanese name, Jokyōkō no Shakujō, which gives no indication of how the possessive should be handled in an English translation. (Do the Toonzaki subs cover that episode?) Also, if the other rules I've presented are correct, it should be "Priestess's" regardless of which standard is used. Although I'm not fully confident in my summation of words ending in "ss".

"Zeus' Breath" has used both "Zeus's Breath" and "Zeus' Breath" in closed captions, with "Zeus' Breath" being the more recent. But like Horus, Zeus might fall into the ancient names exception for the third standard.

Anyway, I'm probably just nitpicking at this point. It seems likely we'll be going with s'. -- Deltaneos (talk) 20:07, October 16, 2012 (UTC)

Okay, finally added an apostrophe section to cover this. However there's one thing above that doesn't seem right. Treating words that end in s, but don't sound that way as if they don't end in s seems fine e.g. "debris's effect". But treating words that don't end in s, but sound like they do seems a bit weird. e.g. "Rex' Deck".

For the sake of completing the apostrophe section, does anyone remember where we discussed curly VS straight quotation marks/apostrophes and is it considered unencyclopedic to use contractions like "can't"? -- Deltaneos (talk) 20:01, November 22, 2012 (UTC)

Did the "curly VS straight" discussion involve "Karakuri" monsters? --Golden Key (talk • contribs) 20:09, November 22, 2012 (UTC)

This it? --Golden Key (talk • contribs) 20:12, November 22, 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, that's it. No outstanding objections to making straight ones the standard, I take it? -- Deltaneos (talk) 20:22, November 22, 2012 (UTC)

Not from me, though I would like to mention that a bot run for the Karakuri monsters needs to be done. --Golden Key (talk • contribs) 20:31, November 22, 2012 (UTC)

I believe SOP for possessivizing (lol new word) stuff like "Rex" is to go ahead and append an "s" after the apostrophe, e.g. "Rex's"; I've never seen any cases of just "Rex'" AFAICR. See also wikipedia:Apostrophe#Singular nouns ending with an "s" or "z" sound. 「ディノ奴千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 06:38, November 23, 2012 (UTC)

Coming back to what to do with words ending in a double s. I've found one case where it's used; Anna's "Goddess's Punishment" Deck. I think it should be safe to list such words as an exception. -- Deltaneos (talk) 23:04, January 6, 2013 (UTC)