The Manual of Style serves as the official guide to editing Rust Wiki articles. Unless otherwise stated, the rules must be followed without exception.

Articles

Order

• {{Template:LastUpdate}}
• {{Notifications}}
• {{Infobox}}
• Lead: A few paragraphs summarising the article
• Table of Contents
• Headings and main content
• Notes
• References

Headings

• Headings should use standard English "sentence" case instead of title case; that is, non-pronouns should not be capitalized unless they are the first word in the header.
• Similar to an indentation in traditional English literature, headings serve as the dividers of an article. However, it should not be used exclusively as the beginning and ending points of a paragraph. Under most circumstances, one space between sections would suffice. Headings should be reserved for removing the marks of distinctly different sections, and each heading should be placed in order of prominence, meaning, heading 2 (a set of == at either end of the title of the section) should come before a related heading 3 (===), and so on.

Titles

• The first mention of the article name in the introductory paragraph should be bolded (wiki markup: ''' or ).
• Titles should follow typical English title conventions, for example, titles should have every word capitalized unless it is one of the prepositions such as "and," "of" and et cetera.
• Literature, video games, and films titles should be italicized (wiki markup: '' or ).
• "The" should typically be avoided in any title and it should be written in the singular form rather than the plural. Exceptions would be made if the article is about a group with a plural name.
• Use parentheses to distinguish similarly named articles.

Vocabulary

Language

• Formal use of language must be observed on all canon articles.
• Contractions must be avoided as these are too informal.

Perspective

• In-universe articles should be written as if Rust were the real world. These include locations, items, weapons, and other in-universe articles.
• Real world articles are written from "our" perspective. These include walkthroughs, personnel, music, and other real world articles.
  • Avoid the usage of "I," "you," and "me"; instead, use "the player" or alternative words.

Spelling

• American spelling is generally preferred on the canon articles, on any template transcribed on articles, and on all official announcements.
  • Regional variations in spelling may be used in all other contexts on Rust Wiki, such as talk pages, userpages, and blog posts.
  • If quoting a source, never alter any part of the quotation, even if it does not use American spelling.

Tenses

For in-universe articles:

• Past tense must be used on any event articles, articles describing entities that are deceased or no longer exist, or sections of any in-universe article detailing past events.
• Present tense must be used on any item, weapon, location, enemy, and character article, where this does not conflict with the above guideline on past tense.

Images

• Avoid sandwiching text between two images that face each other, or between an image and an infobox.
• Lead images, which usually appear inside an infobox, thumbnails shown in the article should usually be no wider than 250px.
• Images that are not part of an infobox should have a caption (use the "thumb" function in the image tag).

Links

• Avoid including multiple links for the same articles on the same page. Linking to one page several times is known as "overlinkage," and it can create walls of link-text, in addition to simply looking gaudy. For example, if "Mutated Bear" was already linked in a page, please refrain from linking it again to the same page later in the article.
  • Headings are not linked in mainspace articles. They are however, permitted in blogs or userpages.
  • Image and video captions are not linked.
• Do not use external links in the body of an article. Articles can include an external links section at the end, pointing to further information outside Rust Wiki as opposed to citing sources.

Miscellaneous

Source mode editing markup

• Place spaces on either side of the text in a heading e.g. == Heading ==.
• Place a blank line before a line containing a heading, except when a sub-heading immediately follows a heading, where there should be no blank line between the heading and the sub-heading.
• Do not place a blank line between a heading and the text or files below it.
• File link parameters should appear in this order: [[File:Filename.png|thumb|right|200px|Description.]]
• Place blank lines before and after a file, separating it from body text.
• Place a space after the asterisk and hash symbols in unordered and ordered lists respectively, so that each new list item is easier to find e.g. * Item.

To promote consistency and ease of editing, the following items, if appropriate, should appear in this order before the lead section of an article.

1. Information about other uses, similar topics and links to disambiguation pages.
2. Notices detailing article quality and areas of improvement – if more than one is used, they should appear together on the same line, and should not be separated by spaces.
3. Infobox template, if a relevant one exists, split apart with a line for each template parameter. The closing curly bracket for the infobox template should be on a new line. The lead section should begin directly after this curly bracket, not on a new line.

Other notes

• Quotes may be added to any page. Quote boxes should only be used once at the top of the page.
• Speculation may not be added to any Rust Wiki article.