Guild Wars Wiki:Formatting/Abbreviations

This page is an accepted formatting guideline on the Guild Wars Wiki. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all contributors should follow. Before editing this page, it is suggested to gather consensus on the talk page first.

Abbreviations of other article names are a common practice, especially when the correct article name is long, contains numerous special characters, or is otherwise cumbersome to type out; or for abbreviations commonly used in-game. The most frequent abbreviations are two- to four-letter acronyms, such as SS, MoR and FomF. Because these abbreviations frequently overlap, it is sometimes necessary to create a disambiguation page instead of a redirect. This article covers the policy for such disambiguation pages. Note that this policy includes all categories of abbreviations, even if they are not acronyms.

Disambiguation

The disambiguation template should be applied at the top of the page.

Abbreviations covered

Generally, an abbreviation should only be listed if it is unique enough and in common enough use that it is highly unlikely to require further explanation. As it stands, the most common applications of abbreviations consist of a skill, an outpost, an item or other popular gaming terminology which is frequently used in the game; examples: Weapon of Warding (WoW), Temple of the Ages (ToA), Voltaic Spear (VS), Nicholas (Nick), and Screenshot (SS). This current practice leads to the frequent need of disambiguation pages which often offer a best guess scenario and sometimes overlook more obscure references. The last example illustrates such a case of these disambiguation pages in its "SS" link.

Recommended courses of action

• Encouraging users to take the time to fully write out used terminology with its first use such as Temple of the Ages followed by introducing its following abbreviated uses in parentheses such as (TotA or ToA) in the span of a given page.
• Alternately, allowing other users to make clarification edits in order to cut down on unnecessary confusion and the need for disambiguation pages except for those made necessary by common naming of in-game separate entities (Area:Outpost, Area:Explorable area, Area:Mission, and similarly encountered scenarios made common by the nature of the game rather than by popular usage).
• Such action should not be warranted when the user is already taking the time to hyperlink to the page that would already explain their desired meaning, when the abbreviation is used in the space of the page(s) of its definition, or when other nearby references provide reasonable evidence of an abbreviation's meaning.

Order

When they are found necessary, disambiguation articles should be listed by type, then alphabetically, offering enough information to help narrow the scope of the referenced abbreviation based on the available context it was used in. In the skills type, they should additionally be sorted by profession or title before alphabetical ordering is applied. The order for skills is as follows:

• Warrior
• Ranger
• Monk
• Necromancer
• Mesmer
• Elementalist
• Assassin
• Ritualist
• Paragon
• Dervish
• Allegiance skills
• Sunspear skills
• Asuran skills
• Deldrimor skills
• Norn skills
• Ebon Vanguard skills

The order for types is as follows:

• Skills
• NPCs
• Locations
• Items
• Other