Community Style Guidelines

This is intended to be an overview of community-driven stylistic decisions for the Victory Belles wiki. As items arise, they will be added.

These guidelines will undergo significant revisions as Victory Belles Community Wiki is currently in the process of moving to an independently-hosted MediaWiki instead of Fandom, granting the community more freedom in how the site is built.

Abbreviations and Shortenings

For consistency, please observe the following abbreviations/shortenings since more than one valid option exists.

• World War 2 - WW2

In addition, the following should not be shortened.

• When referring to experience points, the word should be written out, rather than abbreviated as "XP" (though "points" need not be included when "experience" clearly refers to the in-game numerical system denoting a Belle's level).

Accents and Language Marks

Where possible, a Belle/ship name should retain any accents or other markings of its native language. For example, Algérie retains its accented letter.

Wiki Page

A Belle page should be the name of the ship the Belle represents without any national modifiers (like "USS") or hull designators (like "CA"). Use hull numbers only if needed, which is expected to be rare as described for Wasp below. Several United States Belle pages were moved to a namespace with only their name in September 2021.

Should a reader stumble across any Belle pages with modifiers/designators, feel free to move them to "just the name." No redirects are required, and will be deleted if found as they serve no purpose.

Character

Refer to the Belle in the same way as the page.

"Maury is one of the starting Belles available to the United States faction."

Ship

Refer to the historical ship using its national designator ("USS," "HMS," etc.) and hull number if needed (in cases of multiple ships sharing the same name such as aircraft carrier USS Wasp--CV-7 and CV-18).

There is no consensus on whether historical ship names should be italicized when used in the wiki. When a consensus is reached, this page shall be updated.

"USS Maury (DD-401) was one of the most decorated ships of WW2."

Capitalization

Due to community prevalence (such as on Discord, and existing content on this and another inactive wiki) and staff usage, both "Belle" and "Morgana" should be treated as proper nouns.

Referencing the wiki itself ("On this wiki...") should not be capitalized.

There is no current (September 2021) consensus on capitalization of specific game terms. For example, when discussing a Belle's main battery, should it be written "Battery I" or "battery I?" Should nouns like "vestures" be capitalized?

Two-word ship type categories (such as Light Cruiser) have both words capitalized.

Equipment

Equipment names in Victory Belles can be very complex and lengthy, with a single digit denoting two different pieces of otherwise-similar equipment.

Links

Bare links are bad! Even in trivia sections! (Like dumping a link to the ship's Wikipedia article.) The only place bare links won't look ugly is in reference sections at the bottom of pages.

It is recommended to link WikiWords (such as "Belle") on their first use in an article.

Most questions about creating MediaWiki links can be answered in this article.

Maps

A map page name should just be the name of the map without HQ levels or other modifiers. Those details are already contained on the page, and the infobox title is pulled from the page.

Map pages should contain an image of the map as viewed from a Campaign. At present (October 2021) obtaining "clean" images of maps without player ship icons, node highlights, or scouting ranges is not easy. It is expected until some method is standardized (or map images are provided by the developers--unlikely) that many map articles will use "good enough" placeholder images.

Infoboxes with two images are preferred--first the map, then locations of Morganas spawns.

For consistency when describing available map resources, treat them all as proper nouns. These resources are, from left to right in the Victory Belles interface: Personnel, Fuel, Ammo, Steel, and Rare Materials. The others, Prestige and Diplomacy, are not available as Cruise drops.

Known map Limits are No Torpedoes and No Aircraft, as demonstrated by the red icons on the right below. File:Map limits.png

Like Belle pages, map pages push lengthy lists onto a subpage. All map pages have "MapName/BellesOfInterest" for vesture drops, and maps with bases also possess "MapName/MapBaseTable" which details the nation(s) whose base(s) are present on the map.

Mobile First

As a game primarily directed at mobile users, this wiki should strive to present information in a way that is optimized for mobile devices.

• Think vertical.
• Avoid horizontal scrolling, even a little.
• Minimize image use outside of tutorials on page-writing like this one (which is an activity best performed on a computer).
• Prefer more rows, fewer columns (templates tend to encourage a two-column layout which fits well on mobile).
• Consider moving extremely long tables of data (such as statistics) to a separate statistics page for the item in question. Belle detail pages have a preloaded template.

Numbers

Decimals

If the game uses a decimal, use the period, do not switch to a comma.

Handling Zeroes

If the game uses a leading zero on a displayed decimal value (such as armor quality), the wiki should retain the leading zero when listing it. If the game uses a trailing zero on a displayed decimal value (such as performance), the wiki should retain the trailing zero when listing it.

Thousands Separators

The separator for thousands should be a comma.

Test Belle has 2,500 hitpoints at level 1.

Test Belle's historical ship displaced 25,000 tons.

Pages

All Belle main pages are template/Cargo driven and require very little human interaction. Documentation explains what options an editor might need to set.

Player/Reader References

If an article must reference players of the game generally, readers of the wiki, or both, avoid using "you."

Players should be aware of their flagship's tactics before a battle.

If a reader has opinions on this Belle, please add them to the talk page.

Speculative Belles

Adding Belles whose presence has not been confirmed by either the developers or users finding said Belle in-game is not allowed. Yes, we know a "shipgirl" game will probably eventually get Yamato, but she's not present right now so don't add her (or anyone else) based on guessing.