Difference between revisions of "Twinsuniverse:Style"

Revision as of 22:46, 23 October 2012

The Encyclopedia Twinsunica is an encyclopedia summarizing the two adventures of Twinsen, as seen in Little Big Adventure and Little Big Adventure 2. To avoid confusions, this page deals with how to design articles in the encyclopedia.

What the Twinsunica isn't

The Twinsunica is not a guide to LBA

This might sound confusing, but the Twinsunica is not an encyclopedia to LBA. Rather, it is an encyclopedia for "in-game" terms only.

The large community around the two games brought to life many terms that might be appropriate in an LBA encyclopedia, but not in one covering the actual terms in the games. For example, LBAwin is a port created by LBA's main programmer, Sébastien Viannay. While a very important term in the LBA culture, LBAwin is not a part of Twinsun, Zeelich or Emerald Moon, and therefore has no place in the Twinsunica.

In other words, concetrate on in-game terms only. The only valid articles that are not part of the actual games are Little Big Adventure and Little Big Adventure 2.

The Twinsunica is not a walkthrough to LBA

While this might sound obvious, in the early days of the encyclopedia, many articles looked like a walkthrough to the games. Let's suppose, for example, that in LBA 2 Twinsen went to Jerome Baldino, and gave him a proto-pack. Once upon a time, some people would write something like:

In LBA 2, Twinsen went to Baldino, and gave him a proto-pack

Some even took it further, and phrased it like that:

In LBA 2, go to Baldino's house, and give him the proto-pack

As this is supposed to be an encyclopedia, events that already happened should appear in the past tense (see below). Also, the words "LBA" and "LBA 2" should be avoided in any case. Instead, prefer the use of "Twinsen's first adventure", "Twinsen's second adventure", "during FunFrock's reign", "after the landing of the Esmers", etc.

In short, a proper phrasing of the above scenario would be:

In his second adventure, Twinsen went to Jerome Baldino,
and gave him the proto-pack

Tenses

The use of which tenses to use in the encyclopedia has been a debating issue for a long time, and has yet to be resolved. Given here is the general agreement of what most people think. If you disagree or have any comments, please use the discussion page to tell us what you think.

As the Twinsunica is, presumably of course, an encyclopedia written on Twinsun after the events of Twinsen's second adventure, events concerning the actual adventures should be written about in the past tense (see above). General description of places, characters and objects should be written in the present tense.

However, there are a few exceptions. First of all, obviously some time has passed from the end of Twinsen's first adventure to the end of his second one. Characters and locations could have changed a great deal since then, especially with the absence of FunFrock now. Since in LBA 2 we only get to see a small part of Twinsun, many things could have changed, without our knowledge of it.

Additionally, after Twinsen defeated FunFrock in Dark Monk's Statue, Zeelich went back from its hell form to its ancient heavenly look. So, for example, writing in the Zeelich article that "Zeelich is an ugly planet" would simply do it injustice. On the other hand, we only get to see the beautiful Zeelich for a very short time, and we hardly know what happened to most of it, especially the Under-Gas.

There is no major solution to these issues. The best thing to do would, probably, be to describe what the place or the character was like at the time Twinsen saw it, as well as leaving a comment that there is no knowledge of what it is like now.

Note: the current state of many articles is far from being as described above. You are more welcome to fix this situation by editing those articles.

Prefer paragraphs over lists

Some internet encyclopedias, for example Lostpedia, tend to prefer dot-pointed articles over paragraphs. For example, in an article about the School of Magic, we might see something like this:

• On Desert Island
• Mystery to most Twinsunians
• Twinsen went here to cure his Dino-Fly
• etc.

To make it look more "official", always use paragraphs in your articles. See also Twinsunica:Articles layout, to see how the general layout of the articles should be written.