Robot Wars Wiki:Style Guide

The Style Guide is a guideline for the style of articles on the wiki. The purpose of the guide is to ensure consistency across the wiki and to avoid disputes over preferred styles.

These guidelines are not official policies of the wiki, so users do not risk punishment for not following them. Also, the content of an article will always take precedence over the style of it, so please do not remove content from a page just because it is not formatted properly. Please either format the article yourself or add the   tag to the article.

These guidelines are not set in stone and discussion of more effective ideas is welcomed on the talk page. However, please wait until the new guidelines have been discussed and approved before changing them on this page.

Language
As a general rule, British spellings are preferred over American ones, as Robot Wars was a British programme. For example, 'honour' rather than honor' and 'metre' rather than 'meter'. However, American spellings are acceptable on articles about the American series and American robots. For articles about series and robots from neither the UK nor the USA, neither the British nor the American spellings are preferred, but please try to keep the spelling consistent across the article.

When writing about a robot, please use words like 'it' and 'was' rather than 'they' and 'were' as you are referring to something which is singular and not plural. For example, "Panic Attack was the first robot to compete in Heat F. In the Gauntlet, it took the centre route and, after a nervy start, made it onto the ramp."

Robot names
For robot articles, the title should be the same as the title that was used on the programme. In situations where more than one title is used for a robot, use the most commonly used title. For example, 'Sumpthing' rather than 'Sump Thing'. In this situation, make a reference in the article to the fact that the robot used an alternate name in certain series. If you are not sure which name to use, please discuss the issue in the Forum or on the Community Portal.

For teams that entered more than one robot, all robots should be included on the same page with the most notable robot used for the page title. In most cases, this will be robot which got furthest in the main competition or the robot that had the most wins. In some rare cases, robots with fewer wins are regarded as the more notable robot if there is something else particularly notable about them. For example, Gemini is regarded as the most notable robot from its team because it was the first clusterbot and won several awards, despite the fact that Mace was twice a series semi-finalist. Again, if you are not sure which name to use, please discuss the issue in the Forum or on the Community Portal. Once the article has been created, pages should be created for the other robots in the team which redirect to the relevant section of the main article.

For 'sequel' robots which include a number at the end of the name, please always use the actual digit rather than roman numerals in all situations. For example, 'Storm 2' rather than 'Storm II'. This way, we can avoid disputes over which format is correct for each individual robot and keep the names consistent across the wiki.

Content
Articles should be created for subjects that are directly related to the Robot Wars TV series. This includes robots, competitions, presenters and commentators, official merchandise and terms used on the programme, among other things. Please only start an article if you have enough information to make a proper article. Please do not start a page with just one or two sentences, unless you intend to expand the article in the near future.

Articles should include information which is accurate, well-written and informative to the reader. All information must be verifiable and completely relevant to the subject of the article. Articles should also include the relevant templates where necessary and the relevant categories at the bottom to make navigation around the wiki easier.