MTG Wiki talk:Manual of Style

Capitalization

I see a lot of capitalization going on lately:

• In page titles like List of In-Multiverse Works and The Prismatic Piper.
• In section headings

The Wikipedia manual of style (which we follow) advises to capitalize the initial letter, but otherwise follow sentence case. I think we should agree on one method.

What are your opinions? --Hunterofsalvation (talk) 06:08, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Interesting points. The Prismatic Piper is unproblematic to my. It is a name just like The Wanderer. Those are naturally capitalized. So I don't see much issue with it.

List of In-Multiverse Works on the other hand is following a title case capitalization, which looks cooler, but is harder to link to hence not the best way to spell out a wiki article.

I think the question would be how would I spell the article in a normal text and that would be list of in-multiverse works and the Prismatic Piper. So in other words Prismatic Paper is capitalized correctly but list of in-multiverse works isn't.

Same goes for section headings.

There are of course special Magic capitalization rules like formats, subtypes and products. But there is some wiggle room like Commander Decks or commander decks, one as a product and the other time as a function. Or Human and human, first used as a subtype and the name of a species.

So while I do think that is it good to be consistent sometimes it can be good to leave thinks as they are if we are in the wiggle room department. - Yandere-sliver (talk) 10:29, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Player Notability Threshold

Reading the policy on that it seems clear that the notability guidelines need to be updated given that three of the four qualifications are no longer attainable (new HoF, Pro Points, Rookie/Player Year). Already some obvious candidates were created already through other qualifiers such as League members. There's no good numerical base for this, though, it doesn't seem like adjusted match points will be recorded permanently nor is it a comparative to Pro Points. Would New Pro Tour Top 8ers be too many new articles? 114.76.200.191 23:17, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Agreed to the update. Unfortunately, the contributor who had created these guidelines (Sene) abandoned the task with the introduction of the leagues, and I have been trying to keep up since. All Top8ers is a bit much maybe. Maybe at least the Top 2 from each Pro Tour, Arena Championship and MOCS, and each regional champion? --Hunterofsalvation (talk) 08:15, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

After two years of Pro Tour, by virtue of pro players being good at their job, 13 and 12 players from the two years made Top 8s don't already have a page, 40% of total spots. Is that too many? I can pick out the ones that have some good bio material (Jason Ye, Rei Zhang, Sean Goddard, Daniel Goetschel, Lucas Duchow, Dominic Harvey, Anthony Lee and Cain Rianhard). 114.76.198.69 10:40, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Direct porting of articles

I was under the impression that it would be plagiarism to lift the information from the planeswalker's guides onto the wiki. Granted, someone would need to paraphrase it, but given I can see someone who has been creating pages for each legendary artifact with a card, it feels like someone will eventually. Is there a rush? 114.76.198.69 10:40, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Quotation punctuation, logical/British vs American style

Wikipedia guidelines are to use logical quotation. The prevailing American quotation style is different, and would seemingly be favored by our "American English preferred" rule. (For a side-by-side comparison, see this edit—American before, logical after.) I think we should explicitly carve out an exception to the American English rule and say that logical quotation is preferred. It's more intuitive, it seems to already be the go-to style around here, and I don't think it gets in the way of "smooth transitions between article text and quoted game materials". --Inktog (talk) 01:22, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

I'm in favor of logical. But I'm also not American, so happy to defer to others. -- RivalRowan (talk) 04:33, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

Interesting catch! I'm American, but I've always been opposed to the American style because it runs the risk of the reader attributing the punctuation to the original quote. I support logical quotations as an exception to the general rule. --Corveroth (talk) 15:47, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

I'm American and I 1000% support logical style. TBH I think "American" is a misnomer at this point and that most digital environments use logical; my understanding is the "American" style stems from the look of printed material, and I guess American style guides haven't really cared to address that difference.- jerodast (talk) 02:00, 30 August 2025 (UTC)

Date format

Help:Template reference says to use MONTHNAME DAY, YEAR date format, and I agree that is indeed widespread in all our references. This isn't standard Wikipedia practice but that's fine - American style is appropriate for an American-published game with most references using that style. I was about to update Template:WebRef/doc with that recommendation, but I guess it'd be nice if the official manual of style endorsed it first instead of just being mentioned on a guide page. Would someone mind adding a short section? Something like:

== Date format ==
:'''Example''': August 5, 1993
This wiki uses American-style dates with the month name fully written out, similar to the datelines of [[Daily MTG|official website]] articles. Specifically, use the full name of the month, day of the month as a cardinal number, a comma, and the full year. The style in article prose may be somewhat flexible, but standardized sections of similar articles (like lead paragraphs for each [[set]]) should be consistent, and infoboxes and citations should always use this style. In cases where an exact day is unknown, state the full month name and full year without any comma, e.g. April 1995.

Tables may ignore this guideline and instead use a numerical YEAR-MONTH or YEAR-MONTH-DAY format, which is more compact. This should be considered the default, although a table specific to one article (not in a template) may use the American style if there is enough room, at the editor's discretion. Style must be consistent throughout the entire table and preferably with other tables in the same article. [[mw:Help:Sortable tables#Dates|Sorting]] works with either style.

(Edited this proposal to address Hunter's point about tables.)

Thanks! - jerodast (talk) 04:23, 30 August 2025 (UTC)

This seems correct, that is how I always try to do it in running text (although it is against my native practice). However, maybe we should something about tables. I usually use Year-Month(-Day) to keep them sortable. --Hunter (talk) 05:27, 30 August 2025 (UTC)

Good point, I haven't messed with dates in tables much. There are two other options to be aware of with tables (apparently - I just read up on mw:Help:Sortable tables#Dates): a) Dates should actually sort correctly in any consistent format; the software is smart enough to look at the first few rows and determine the proper interpretation. Format is not allowed to change in subsequent rows though. b) You can specify a "data-sort-value" (mw:Help:Sortable tables#Specifying a sort key) in each cell to sort anything differently than its displayed contents. This is pretty clunky at scale though.

So, we probably COULD use American date style in tables, but I support your suggestion for compactness. In case multiple tables are transcluded into one article, it's probably best if the ISO style is the primary recommendation, although one-off tables could be allowed to deviate. I'd be fine just saying "all tables use ISO, no deviations," but there is some appeal to allowing a few tables to match the prose if there's no other tables around.

By the way, I sympathize with finding the US style odd haha, it's way less logical. But one of those things that's really hard to change once entrenched. At least in wiki terms, we have the justification that 99% of our references state their dates this way.

Proposal above is now updated with this issue in mind. - jerodast (talk) 03:48, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

I do think "Month (Day), Year" is an okay format for most of the wiki as it is more in line how wizard writes things. I do prefer ISO for tables because from experience I can tell you that mediawiki is not great at sorting other date formats, without specifying data sort values. I also don't think the switching between the two is much of a problem and it is typically clear in which context we are using certain formats. - Yandere-sliver (talk) 08:23, 1 September 2025 (UTC)