Wiki: The Post

Greetings to all you Wikians out there. Today I'm going to rant a bit about the general use of markup on this wiki or should I say, "lack thereof". As there are a lot of blog posts out there, and there seem to be two types of people. There are the text-wallers, that forgo any kind of mark up. And then there are the Funny Guys that use templates to deal Puns of Damage. I won't make a discernibly different judgement between the two, both will be hated equally!

Too Long; Refusing to Read

When writing any content:

• Use spell checkers, capital letters, punctuation and paragraphs... for the love of League, paragraphs!
• Use wiki markup, e.g.:
  • * Unordered lists
  • # Ordered lists
  • Italics text
  • Bold text
  • ==Headings==
  • ===Sub-headings===
• Adhere to the Manual of Style.
• Be consistent in the names you give to things; using both TBC and Cleaverooni is just bad practice (not wrong, just not right)

What's the Deal?

To start off with text-wallers, wall-texters, dump-and-runners or whatever name you'd have for these people. I am convinced they don't mean bad; they are actually taking the time to write a blog, sharing their thoughts and trying to start a discussion. However if you are going to write something worth reading; go for the extra mile and add some punctuation, capital letters, paragraphs, headings and maybe even some magical templates!

And to follow up with the funny guys that use a different name for the same champion for humorous purposes! Or make puns with champion names that have been done, and aren't relevant to the champion in any way!

You Get it? Good!

So what I'd like to see is that people who genuinely care about what they blog to just go that extra mile. Now I know that some of you who really want to do good, just do not know how. But fear not, like Jarvan IV I'm helping!

To Start off

You have to make sure that your English is correct in its essence. I'm not saying your grammar needs to be top notch, or that you should be a star pupil in English class in order to write. I'm just saying; "check your spelling". Now I'd love to say that all major browsers have a built in spell checker, however then I'd have to assume that none of you are Microsoft saps...

...for the rest of us, we have options that require little effort, other then turning on what is already present in Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera. With these tools at hand there is no excuse for writing in Engrish unless you use Internet Explorer. Which really looses it's charm when you consider the many solutions that exist to that problem.

Markup

Now that all of your unintentional squiggly lines have been spotted and resolved, you can start adding markup to your text. This helps to separate different parts of your writing into segments that are easier to read and distinguish from one another. Now I could write a small manual on this, but why reinvent the wheel?

Templates

These are the prancing ponies that a lot of bloggers use to spice things up. They give us links with icons to items, champions, abilities and spells, e.g., The Black Cleaver, Urgot, Acid Hunter and Ignite. While not absolutely necessary, they do clarify exactly who or what is being talked about. It also helps to give focus to the important parts of your text, as those parts are being highlighted. This makes your entire blog just easier to read.

You can find any template that might be useful [[[:Category:Icon templates|here]] of which you'd presumably be most interested in:

• Champions
• Abilities
• Spells
• Masteries
• Items

There are different templates that you'd want to use like the "cai template" to get Urgot's Noxian Corrosive Charge or the "mi2 template" to get dated mastery investments like Demolitionist to still display. Just skim trough the Icon Templates once in a while to get what you need creatively.

You Have the Tools, now What?

Now you learn moderation. Templates are a powerful tool to get your point across and they can bring a lot of flare to the table. However, just like no one is happy when you remind them of how great your weekend was, twelve times every hour. No one is really going to be happy with you when you overuse them. The manual of style states that you should alternate your words to prevent the wording on an article from getting stale and boring. It also states that you should only link/mark a first instance of a concept. So which do you use?

Abbreviations

When using abbreviations for an item or champion, stay consistent. You write the first instance of the item in full, and then use the abbreviation across the post consistently. I'll give you a short example of how I would personally do it below.

• When you look at The Black Cleaver or TBC, you'll note that it consists of two parts. The first being the persistent statistics of health, attack damage, cooldown reduction, and armor penetration. And the second being the passive that reduces the armor of your target by 5 / 10 / 15 / 20 / 25% whenever you deal physical damage.
  • This makes TBC a great item for Urgot since he can use all the persistent statistics it gives and Urgot's Noxian Corrosive Charge fully applies TBC's passive.

Now there are no abbreviations set in stone, you can make your own if you want to. And how you implement them is up to you, if you don't want to use the full name of the item at all, that's fine too. As long as you stay consistent!

Comic Relief

I know a lot of you guys out there use templates a lot to make your blogs lighter and feel fresh. But comic relief should also be used in moderation! It makes the difference between a light read, and a big joke. When you give champions like Crabbot a different name, it comes across as a nice nickname and maybe a good reference to some out of game concept, in this case a crab mixed with a bot. But when you keep bashing the anthropod like he is some sort of bug, the fun and humor quickly fades. Seeing as you are just abusing the cripple by calling him names.

Instead of making it a light read, it just becomes a contest to see how many different names you can come up with for the same champion, which in turn become insulting at some point. When you do this to an actual person in any way, shape or form, it's considered bullying by most standards. A nickname is fine, if it's a funny nickname that's even better. But please don't abuse the name of a champion that we all know and maybe even love.

Finally

To finish this up,

I'm not telling you all that you suck nor am I saying that it's my way or the highway. This is just to try and help people that obviously care enough to write something here. And I wouldn't know why you don't want your writing to reflect how beautiful your thought really is. If you "don't know how" I hope this post helps you and if you already knew, well I hope you learned at least something from this. Thanks all of you for reading this far.

--Deshiba, the Nitpicker