User:Sol Pacificus/Manual of style

The Manual of Style is the codified set of standards for writing and formatting across all articles here at the Assassin's Creed Wiki where we strive for a level of professionalism as diligent as any other academic medium.

As with any style guide, the aim of this page is to ensure clarity, coherence, and consistency throughout our articles through efficient organization, thereby rendering our content readily accessible to the audience. Although we share common principles with conventional styles of professional writing, our manual of style is specially adapted to the unique goal of synthesizing Assassin's Creed lore and presenting it in an encyclopedic format. Those familiar with composing scholarly works need not refrain from drawing strategies from that background when contributing to this wiki. However, it should also be remembered that Assassin's Creed Wiki is a special platform of its own with distinct standards that have been developed by convention and consensus to best fit our specialty.

Perspective

More than just a typical guide on a video game series, Assassin's Creed Wiki is dedicated to compiling and maintaining the lore of the entire franchise. To that end, our first and foremost priority is to synthesize the metanarrative of not only each game, but also across the diverse range of transmedia. We meticulously incorporate every piece of information on the series' universe, no matter how minor, and weave them together into a unifying whole, so that fans may witness how its world truly manifests.

Because our encyclopedia revolves more around the series as a world and less on the series as merely games, it is essential that articles are written from an in-universe perspective rather than an out-of-universe one with few exceptions.

In-Universe

When an article is written from an in-universe perspective, it is roleplaying as a document in the world of Assassin's Creed itself. Imagine that you are an Assassin who, eager to research the history of the Hidden Blade, consults a digital database which has begun to archive all this information. This database is Assassin's Creed Wiki, and although it does not actually exist within the series' canon, for our purposes, we act as though it does when writing. We pretend as though we, the writers, are within the universe of Assassin's Creed rather than fans existing outside of it.

This perspective of writing manifests in the following ways:

• First, all subjects must be treated as though they are non-fictional rather than fictional.
• Second, the historical past tense is used unless the subject still exists in the present moment in the series. Under conventional grammar rules, plot summaries for fictional works are written in the literary present tense. Because we imagine the Assassin's Creed world to be that of reality, however, even fictional characters that have since died in the story (e.g. Haytham Kenway) are treated as actually having existed at one point before passing away. When writing about them, they should therefore be described in the past tense. Conversely, subjects that still exist at the current time in the story (e.g. the Animus, Rebecca Crane, Rome) should be described in the present tense as usual.
• Third, note that the series' setting closely aligns with that of real-life, so as a general rule of thumb, the current year in real-life is the current year in the series' story even in the absence of a new release in a particular year. Furthermore, the series is essentially set in a parallel universe to that of reality, with every historical event in the story mirroring that of our actual history. As a result, if a subject, be it an individual, city, or war, currently exists in real-life, even in the absence of an explicit reference to its current status in the Assassin's Creed universe, its status is presumed to be the same. Thus, if you are unsure if Masyaf still stands as a city in the present day of Assassin's Creed and no source in the series gives a clear answer, refer to its real-life status to find out. The exception to this rule is if within Assassin's Creed lore itself, it has been made explicit that the subject no longer exists even if it still does in the real world. In the event of such a deviation, one must of course defer to the Assassin's Creed version.