Blooncyclopedia:Style guide

Article titles

Main article: Blooncyclopedia:Article titles

Writing style

Main article: Blooncyclopedia:Writing guidelines

Spelling

• Because Bloons games are not very consistent with their usage of American English vs. British English spelling, this wiki allows either spelling standard to be used by editors.
• If the article's title requires a specific spelling standard (i.e. Town Center or Large Calibre), then the text of the article must use the same spelling standard; otherwise, the spelling is up to the editor.
• If an article is already clearly written in one spelling standard, then any additions/changes should be consistent with what the article uses. For example, if an article has clearly established its use of British English by other editors, then any additions/changes to the article must also be in British English from that point onwards. Editing an article to make the spelling more consistent is constructive, but changing all the spelling from one to the other without reason is unconstructive and edits of this nature will be reverted.
• If an article links to another article with a title that uses a different spelling standard, the link text should not be changed to match. For example, Christmas Tree Energising Totem should not render links to Energizing Totem as "Energising Totem".
• Regardless of the spelling used within the article, text taken from official sources (i.e. in-game descriptions) should always be transcribed exactly as written.

Foreign languages

• If foreign text is written in a non-Latin script (i.e. Hangul or Cyrillic), then the romanization of the text should be added using the {{hover}} template.
• If foreign text does not have an official translation, then an unofficial translation should be placed next to it in parentheses. This mainly applies to voice clips in foreign languages and content exclusive to the Chinese version of Bloons TD 6, and should not be used for content that already has an official English equivalent.

Foreign text	Usage	Result
C'est la guerre !	''C'est la guerre !'' (''That's war!'')	C'est la guerre ! (That's war!)
아싸, 지렸다리~	{{hover|''아싸, 지렸다리~''|Assa, jiryeotdari~}} (''Oh yeah, I was awesome~'')	아싸, 지렸다리~ (Oh yeah, I was awesome~)

Headers and sections

• Major sections should start with level 2 headings (==Heading==). Level 1 headings (=Heading=) should never be used; it is reserved for the article's title and is automatically inserted by the software this wiki uses.
• Like article titles, headers should be written in sentence case; only the first word and proper nouns should be capitalized.
• Try to avoid using headers below level 4.

Trivia sections

The purpose of headers and sections is to organize information in a way that makes finding specific topics easier. Sometimes information is worth noting but is not significant enough to warrant its own section, in which case it usually belongs in a "trivia" section. Unfortunately, some editors, especially new users, tend to ignore this and just dump everything they want to write about into trivia sections, which can quickly lead to trivia sections being bloated with information that is irrelevant, or repeats information already explained better elsewhere, or could be expanded into its own section.

• Be mindful when creating or adding to a trivia section. If a trivia section already has five bullet points or more, see if you can move any of it to a different section of the article or to another article.
• Trivia sections should always be level two headings placed above the gallery and/or foreign languages.
• Trivia sections should never have sub-headings. If there's enough information on a specific trivia point for it to have its own section, then it's not trivial and should have its own section elsewhere.

Linking

• In general, articles should only be linked to once in a single page, though links can be repeated if in a section much later in the article. If the word "monkey" is used 10 times in a page, then only the first occurrence of the word should be linked, and maybe a later one too if the article is long and has multiple major sections.
• Try to optimize links as much as possible. For example, you can use [[Monkey]]s instead of [[Monkey|Monkeys]] to render the link text in plural form. (See Help:Links for more information.)
  • If you need to link to a subsection and it has a redirect, just link to the redirect instead of using a piped link. For example, use [[Paragon power]] instead of [[Paragon#Power|Paragon power]] when linking to the section about Paragon power. That way, the link doesn't need to be updated in case the section is split into its own article at a later point.

Once and only once

"Once and only once" is a term in programming that essentially states that there is no point in doing something repeatedly when it only needs to be done once. The same principle applies to this wiki: don't repeat yourself. That is, you should avoid duplicating the same information across different articles because it makes it more difficult to keep that information up-to-date. For example, what each targeting option does for every tower and upgrade in BTD6 is unnecessary when targeting options have the same effect on most towers and upgrades and users can just go to the articles for those targeting options to find out what they do. These articles should only note exceptions to the rule, such as attacks that always target first.