Soyjak Wiki:Manual of Style

This is the Soyjak Wiki Manual of Style, showing you how to and how not to create pages on the site.

Let's begin with some basic rules:

Basic rules

• You WILL be creative
• You WILL NOT add 67 thrembillion templates to the top of the page
  • You absolutely WILL NOT copy the source code of a template to inject directly into an article
    • You VILL NEVER EVER EVER create a custom template inside of an existent article
• You WILL NOT use an insane amount of buzzwords and soyslang to make the page incoherent
• You WILL add links to relevant pages (but only do it the first time something appears, don't add redundant links for no reason)
• You WILL NOT add shit nobody cares about
  • You WILL NOT make pages on random namefags. If you want a phonebook, go edit Encyclopedia Dramatica.
• You WILL be funny
• You WILL keep the page IAS
• You WILL bold the name of the page for its first mention on the first paragraph
• You WILL capitalize the "the" in "The Party" and "The Sharty" because it is part of the name
• You ARE NOT be writing in a ESL
• You WILL use proper grammar and capitalization
• You WILL use appropriate formatting
• You WILL archive your sources, preferably with more than one service (archive.today, and ghostarchive are the main two used in the Soysphere.)
• You WILL NOT use a sharty link directly in an article. You WILL use the archiving websites above and archive.soyjak.st.
• You WILL NOT link to user pages in the main namespace without a very good reason, especially your own
• You WILL NOT speak in the first person in articles like it's your personal blog
• You WILL say Soyjak.party, Sharty, the Sharty, the Party, or der 'arty instead of The Party or The Sharty.
• And you WILL BE HAPPY

Guidelines In Detail

Page Names

• Page names should always be singular, not plural, and the plural version of a page should be made into a redirect to the singular.
• Page names should avoid needless capitalization. "Soyjak variants" instead of "Soyjak Variants". The capitalized version should be made into a redirect. The exception is when the second word is actually capitalized (e.g names) such as "Nikocado Avocado".

Templates

Template spam is the easiest issue to avoid.

Is the page a gem or a coal? Is there anything special about what type of gem or coal it is? Okay, add the template that denotes quality. Do NOT use multiple quality templates. Only use one. The exception is irony. Try to avoid adding the Gem template to articles unless they're high quality, detailed, follow the Manual of Style, and otherwise could be agreed upon to be good articles. If the subject is gemmy, but the article needs work, consider using the Ruby template instead. If you try to use the Gemerald/vantawhite/tanzanite templates on your own article like a selfish little fuck with an oversized ego, the FDL WILL be dispatched to your location. Those should be saved for the absolute highest quality articles; if you have to ask, your article definitely isn't.

Are there any other templates that may apply to the topic? If no, leave it be. Otherwise, you should only add two, or maybe three if the subject is a massive gegbull. Again, DON'T add similar templates. It might be tempting to add templates that make the screen bright, but it will just get annoying for readers to get flashed with an entire screen full of ugly boxes, and being forced to scroll an entire page length down to get to the actual meat of the article. If the templates take up more than half a page length, cut it down.

Quick guide to knowing which template to use:

• Stub article (gemmy topic): Template:Ruby
• Stub article (neutral topic): Template:Stub
• Stub article (coally topic): Template:Coal
• If an article is likely to forever remain a stub because of how dusty and irrelevant the topic is, use Template:Dust
• Non-stub article (gemmy topic): Template:RubyShort, Template:GemShort, Template:GemeraldShort (there are some alternative options, but for brevity's sake, they're not included)
• Non-stub article (gemmy page, even if the topic itself is coal): Template:Gem, Template:IronicGem, Template:Gold
• Non-stub article (neutral topic): Template:IronShort, Template:Vantagray, Template:Equinox
• Non-stub article (neutral page): Template:Iron
• Non-stub article (coally topic): Template:DustShort, Template:CoalShort, Template:Vantablack, Template:Brimstone, or Template:Antimatter, depending on how bad it is (in descending order).
  • Use DustShort for forgettable coal, CoalShort for regular coal, Vantablack for darker than average coal, Brimstone for very bad and coally topics, and Antimatter for the worst of the worst stuff.

Not listed are templates like Vantawhite, Gemerald, Tanzanite, and other "this page/subject is extremely high quality" templates, which you SHOULD NOT put on articles until you've lurked long enough to know what does and doesn't deserve the template. Remember, if everything is a "gemerald", then nothing is.

DO NOT directly paste raw template code into an article. You might be able to get away with it if it's a smaller part of the article, but if it takes up more than a line or two in the editor, or if you're using it more than once, please just use a template. Otherwise, you're creating a mess that gets in the way when other people try to edit your article.

Don't fucking do this when adding formatting to your article.

Speaking of, don't make templates unless you absolutely know what you're doing. We already have 423 thrembillion templates, chances are yours is just redundant at best and page bloat at worst. If you're being directed to this, you do not know what you're doing. An exception can be made for navbox templates (those expandable parts at the bottom which contain a directory of related articles), but for the most part, please stick to templates that already exist.

Template Order

• Template:Distinguish always goes at the very top.
• Template:Pizza goes at the top if the article is on a doxed individual.
• When ordering Header Templates try and order them from widest to shortest (or whatever looks better on the page).
• Preferably put Quality templates after Header templates.
• Footers go at the bottom below Template:Reflist for citations.

Links

Try to avoid putting multiple hotlinks to the same article/site unless absolutely necessary; this helps prevent articles from becoming all blue because someone kept putting links inside every mention of any given term on the page. Stick to linking to something once per page, and put the link in the first mention of the term only.

Grammar

Basic understanding of the English language is critical for your edits to be taken seriously. The editors here are willing to fix Science-honest mistakes here and there, after all, we are all coalesced space dust, and sometimes we may miss on a grammatical error from here and there. The problem begins when entire paragraphs become completely unreadable due to a mixture of the following:

• Lack of capitalisation.
• Inconsistent use of capitalisation (i.e. cobSon Will Always be a geM).
• Severe and repeated spelling mistakes.
• Lack of commas or any sentence breaks.
• A lack of paragraphs, resulting in a giant wall of text.
• Sentences that just don't make any sense.
• Using a language other than English (since the Sharty and Soysphere in general is an english speaking community)

If you are a genuine ESL and want to genuinely contribute, then the only advice we can give you is to type whatever you want on Grammarly or any type of grammar-correction software, correct your mistakes, and then Ctrl+C the text & Ctrl+V into the page you want to edit. It is not the responsibility of the Soyjak Wiki or its editors to fix your mess. You have to make sure the shit you type in is readable or else your edits are going to be reverted on sight if it's not worth the effort to fix.

As for whether to use American or British spellings, there isn't really an enforced rule but it's advised to not clog the recent changes log by making tons of tiny edits that do nothing but switch a few words to alternate spellings each. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. When in doubt, the majority of the 'ki uses American spellings by default.

Good pages

This is an example of a good page. Use this as inspiration and help for making new pages or editing already existing ones: Soyjak.party

Other examples of particularly high quality and well written pages include: /vp/ Trolling Tactics, Cobson, Lee Goldson, Operation 9/11, and Impish Soyak Ears

Bad pages

Here is how NOT to create a page. If you create a page like this on this site, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before: Soyjak Wiki:Manual of Style/How to NOT make a page

Alternate example: User:SprokemowerMan/Average Nu-Wiki Article

Miscellaneous

Quoting

Use the Quote template to create imageboard-style quotes, e.g. {{Quote|>walkable cities}}

Multiline greentexts should use the Greentext template; this saves you from having to add the quote template every single line.

>Use the Quote template to create imageboard-style quotes, e.g. {{Quote|>walkable cities}}

>Multiline greentexts should use the Greentext template; this saves you from having to add the quote template every single line.

Dates

When writing dates, prefer either 'May 1, 2000' or 'May 1st 2000' (month, day, then year). Avoid ambiguous formats like '05/01/2000', or relative ones like "just now", "32 seconds ago", "4 days ago", etc. You WILL especially avoid vague relative dates such as "recently", "last week", "a while ago", "just now", etc. Before writing it, ask yourself if it'd be vague or confusing if you were reading it a few years in the past or in the future.

Also, use the {{Date}} template to type out "As of (current date)" so that you don't have to update it every thrembosecond.

Reflists

All references are kept in {{Reflist}}. Do not substitute with ==References== at the bottom of the page.

To re-use citations in the Visual Editor, click Re-Use. To re-use citations in the Source Editor, add name="(literally whatever)" to the original ref. Then use <ref name="(literally whatever)" /> to re-use it. You can call it "peanut butter and jelly sandwich", for all the wiki code cares, as long as both names are identical. If you want be orthodox in the names, you can use ":0", ":1", etc. Include a link to its source and its archive links in the same reference, always make sure to archive what you are accessing with multiple different archive sites and have each archive link be like this [https://archive.ph/274eK (archive.ph link)] after the main link in alphabetical order of the archive site name (example: place archive.ph before Ghost Archive)

Good: <ref name="4chan">https://wiki.bibanon.org/4chan/History [https://archive.ph/ZcCj8 (archive.ph link)] [https://ghostarchive.org/archive/8M134 (Ghost Archive link)] [https://web.archive.org/web/20250313223010/https://wiki.bibanon.org/4chan/History (Internet Archive link)]</ref>

Bad: <ref>https://wiki.bibanon.org/4chan/History</ref> <ref>https://archive.ph/ZcCj8</ref>

Notelists

{{Notelist}} is a special variant of the Reflist, reserved for keeping Notes.

Put your note into {{Note|(your note)}}. To put the notes somewhere, use {{Notelist}} somewhere near the bottom of the article or section.

Use this when you have extra information to convey, but it's inconvenient to put the text in the same place (for example, in an infobox for booru posts, where extra text bloats it up).

Also use it when you feel that certain text is causing bloat within the article, but nonetheless is important.

Traditional Method

Traditionally, you could put your note into <ref group="lower-alpha"> and </ref> brackets. For the actual notelist, you would add {{Reflist|group=lower-alpha|custom header=Notes}} to the bottom of the page. This method is now outdated, due to the aforementioned templates being created for the sake of convenience.

Soystorical

If you add a date for something, make sure to add it to the corresponding Happenings page, also make sure to add it to Birthdays if it is a birthday.

Citations

Soyjak Wiki Guides and Policies Guides: The Manual of Style - Beginner's Guide - About - Staff - Coal Articles - Rollback Policies: Rules - Moderation - Privacy Policy - Policy - Approver Policy