The purpose of this style guide is to homogenize the spelling, linking, and appearance of pages throughout the wiki, and set standards for clear and accurate writing.
Writing about fiction
- Use the present tense. For example: Rainbow Dash performs a sonic rainboom in the episode Sonic Rainboom.
- Write from the audience's perspective.
Frequent mistakes
- alicorn - the show does not use this term; please use "winged unicorn" or "pegasus unicorn pony" or "unicorn pegasus pony" instead. Celestia and Luna are mentioned in the first episode's prologue as "unicorns". Even though Alberghetti uses "alicorns", the information presented on the show takes precedence over external sources.
- parentheses - they are, in general, indicative of bad structure.
Capitalization
- Use sentence case in titles and headlines: capitalize only the first word, proper nouns, and as dictated by other specific English rules.
Punctuation
- Subtitles and image descriptions should have either no punctuation, or proper punctuation.
Links
- Limit links to a specific article to, at most, one per paragraph.
Titles
- Titles of works should be written in italics and without quotation marks. Example: My Little Pony Friendship is Magic.
- Titles of episodes should be written without quotation marks and not italicized.
Spelling
Spelling of titles and names should adhere to the way they appear in the show or in official Hasbro material. Terms that do not appear in the show should adhere to a manual of style, preferably the Wikipedia Manual of Style.
| Term | Notes |
|---|---|
| cute-ceañera | not capitalized; contains hyphen |
| earth pony | not capitalized |
| Elements of Harmony | title case |
| element of (laughter, loyalty, etc) | not capitalized |
| My Little Pony Friendship is Magic | lowercase "is"; no colon |
| Nightmare Moon | Nightmare as one word |
| pegasus pony | not capitalized |
| pony | not capitalized |
| unicorn pony | not capitalized |
| ursa major | not capitalized |
| ursa minor | not capitalized |
| Winter Wrap Up | title case; no hyphen |
| Friendship is Magic, part 1 | lowercase "of" and "part"; contains comma |
Quotes
Quotes should be indented, with character names in bold and separated from the spoken dialogue with a colon. Emphasis should be in italics, and stage directions should be sparse and in brackets.
Example:
- Character: Dialogue, emphasized dialogue.
- [stage directions]
- Fluttershy: [very softly] Yay.
This should not be confused with indicated dialogue in other parts of an article not dedicated to quotes. Instead, use {{quote}}.
Songs
Sung lyrics should be idented and set in a regular font, spoken lyrics should have the name of the speaking character precede them unidented and in bold type. If the vocalist needs to be named, their name should be set inside square brackets before their segment.
Example:
- Lyrics
- Character: Spoken lyrics
- [Vocalist]
- Lyrics