Manual of Style/Layout
The layout of an article is incredibly important both to readers and to editors and should be unified across all articles. Unless otherwise stated, "articles" will refer to articles on specific games, not to essays or to guides. The ordering of the layout will be reflected in the ordering of this manual.
Stub tag
If an article is a stub, it should have the tag {{info-stub}} at the top. What a stub is and is not is subjective, but stubs are roughly articles which have no testing entries, articles which have exactly one or two testing entries but no issue reports and bare-bones comments (e.g. "works", "it works", "works fine", "game's bugged"), or articles which e.g. have one or two tests with descriptive comments but which lack issues, trivia, an infobox, a description, a gallery, etc. Essentially, anything that feels too "bare-bones".
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Infobox
Even though the infobox appears on the right-hand side of the article, within the markup, the infobox is up at the top. The infobox should ideally include an image of the game, game properties, languages supported, and per-region information playability.
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Basic information
The first part of the article proper contains information about the game. In order, these pieces of information are Developer(s), Publisher(s), Genre, Wikipedia (link), Review(s), and Description.
- Developers and publishers are straightforward, and they should be wikilinked, i.e. enclosed in double brackets.
- The genre should be one of the options available in the {{General articles}} navibox under 'Games categories by genre'.
- For Wikipedia, an external link to English is preferable. If the game is predominantly targeted toward a Japanese audience and there are two articles, place the English Wikipedia link first and the Japanese one second as "Link (Japanese)". If there is only a Japanese article and not a corresponding English one for such a game, that can be placed on its own, again with "Japanese" in parentheses.
- Links to reviews should be given to the one or two most popular game review outlets which cover the game. No link is preferable if no coverage is given in major reviewers, and one is preferable if coverage is only given in one. These must be reviews of the PlayStation 2 version of the game (this can include a multi-platform review, but does not include e.g. a separate review of the PC version of a game). IGN and Metacritic will be the top two, and failing those two having a review, the precedence becomes arbitrary.
- The game description will give a concise description of the game, ideally free of major, obvious spoilers. Attempt to make it as neutral as possible. The descriptions of games on the back of the box are copyrighted material and are therefore unsuitable for the description. Use your own words.
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Test configurations
PCSX2 at present supports three major families of operating systems: Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Apple macOS. The three testing tables for these should all be shown by default, and empty ones should contain question marks for the parameters, except for 'Comments' which should be set to '{{TestPlaceholder}}'. All three are to be shown because hiding them by default presents a considerable hurdle for the end user wanting to create a test entry. They should be placed in the following order: first Windows, then Linux, then macOS. They are in this order due to the relative size and activity of PCSX2's userbase on these OSes, not due to any perceived quality or importance of one OS over another.
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Known Issues
This section is meant for issues which can currently be found in the latest version of PCSX2, are not present on original hardware, and can be found with default settings. Please see the documentation for more information about parameters for the issue template.
This portion should be within a Level 2 header, i.e. within double-equal signs.
Fixed Issues
This section is meant for issues which have been listed on the wiki but which have been fixed as of the latest version of PCSX2 (this is not for issues which have later been discovered not to be issues at all). Additionally, issues can be added that have been fixed relatively recently but were not present on the wiki (e.g. do not add an issue that was present in 1.10 ten years after it was fixed, but consider adding one that was fixed several months ago). Workarounds are to be maintained for users who are on older versions, although exceptions can be made for "bodges" which make extensive use of hardware hacks and harm the user experience in the rest of the game.
This portion should be within a Level 2 header, i.e. within double-equal signs.
Non-Issues
This section is meant for issues which have 'IssueLevel=-1'. This flag should be set for two classes of issues: 1) issues which are created with non-default but expected user behavior, and 2) issues which are present on default settings and could be perceived as an emulation issue, but which are also present on original hardware.
Original hardware issues are those that occur on a PlayStation 2 but which could be perceived as a problem with PCSX2, such as noticeable slowdown, graphical issues, etc.
"Non-default but expected user behavior" should be taken only to mean upscaling or the usage of patches which are included with PCSX2 by default, i.e. those in the pcsx2_patches repository on Github. Mucking around with other settings such as clock frequency, clamping, blending (when not advised by the GameDB), mipmapping/filtering, and HW/upscaling fixes do not count and should be removed.
This portion should be within a Level 2 header, i.e. within double-equal signs.
Trivia
This section is meant to give the user trivia about a game, such as its name in other languages. As this is a technical wiki, it is placed below the test configurations and issue reports.
This portion should be within a Level 2 header, i.e. within double-equal signs.
Gallery
This section is meant to showcase screenshots of the game in PCSX2. There is no clear guidance on how these should be laid out at the moment. For example, do we retain images which are clearly outdated? Do we place the screenshots in chronological order? Reverse chronological? Should we retain but hide outdated screenshots?
This portion should be within a Level 2 header, i.e. within double-equal signs.
If the game is part of a wider series, there should be created a corresponding navibox template which can be placed near the bottom of the article. For instance, the Armored Core series has the '{{Armored Core series}}' template. This will allow users to more easily navigate between articles.
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ForumLinksList
Finally, at the bottom of the article, there should be a list to relevant forum links, namely tests of the game on the PCSX2 forums.
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