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.

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.

• Experience should be written out, rather than abbreviated as "XP."

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.

Belle Detail Pages

To keep large data-dumps off the main Belle pages, each Belle has (or will have) a "DetailsPage" that contains her stock configuration, information about vestures, and default armor statistics. Such pages are very legible on mobile devices despite the large amount of data presented. La Motte-Picquet has a fully-filled example of a details page.

The Belle page template should take care of adding a "no details page" box to any newly-created Belle page, however if a page without such a notice is encountered, add the following code. This adds a box with an automatically-generated link which invokes a pre-loaded template to build out the Belle's detail page. The editor then only needs to fill all known fields. Generally the below should be placed after the Gameplay Information section.

{{NoBelleDetailsPage}}

Empty Categories

Some Belles have nothing at all in a certain category--for instance some destroyers have no secondary battery, and most battleships do not equip torpedoes. See this list of templates for use on Belle detail pages in these circumstances.

Multiple Items

When a Belle has more than one of an item (often the case with main battery guns), list the quantity before the item. Follow the number with a space, an 'x,' another space, and finally the name.

Example: 4 x 155mm/50 Mle 1920 Twin Turret Mle 1921

Belle Name, Ship Name

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?

When a two-word ship type (example: heavy cruiser) has its first word capitalized (such as being the first word in an Infobox) the second word should not be capitalized, which is in line with how Categories are named.

Empty Values

When a value for a named line in an existing information box/table is not included, it will automatically populate with Unknown.

Text for an empty value should follow these guidelines.

• If the line can be filled in the future, but the information that would populate it is not currently available, don't type anything into the template for that field! For example, a Belle with a voice whose actress has not been credited publicly at time of page creation would have her voice actress listed as Unknown. See the below template, which would be an Unknown Belle.
• "None" if the line can be filled, but isn't. For example, a Belle whose stock main battery contains an open but empty RDF slot should list RDF as "None," and an unvoiced Belle should list her voice actress as "None."
• "N/A" if the line applies to other uses of the table (as part of the template), but the line is not valid for the table in question. For example, a Belle whose stock main battery configuration has a locked RDF slot would list this as "N/A."

Equipment

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

Wiki Page

No consensus yet exists (September 2021) as to how to name pages for equipment, and equipment pages aren't a priority for the wiki maintainers yet.

Leading 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.

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.

Pages

Pages should be derived from a template if at all possible. This helps standardize the wiki's appearance.

Spaces should be replaced with underscores, like this page (Community_Style_Guide), rather than PascalCasingPageNames because they are easier to read in the URL. Note that the opposite is true with templates, because having a ton of underscores in a template name is irritating when writing pages. Templates are invisible to the user, page names aren't.

This game contains a large amount of data that needs to be presented in a unified, mobile-friendly format. Tables allow corralling said data while maintaining a mobile-friendly experience.

Minimize image usage on main pages--just the infobox for the item, nothing more. For example, if a Belle receives many Costumes, those should be documented on a "Costumes" page, not on her main page!

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.

Table/Information Box

Table vs. Information Box

The Infobox is a stock class on Fandom, and is restricted to loading on the right. The Belle information box is the only (September 2021) current example.

Almost all the templates for tables on Belle "detail pages" are two-column setups with optional column headers and an optional title overall. These work well on mobile and don't look horrible on desktop.