The Build-A-Bear Wiki:Style guide

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For consistency and convenience's sake, The Build-A-Bear Wiki prefers to use styles derived from the standard Wikipedia Manual of Style. The most relevant parts are described here, but the full manual is linked for any bearchivists who run into a style question not answered here.



General

Capitalization

Wikipedia uses sentence case, a capitalization style where the initial word's first letter is capitalized and the rest are as normal, for its page titles and headers. This differs from many websites, such as Build-A-Bear's own, which tend to use title case, in which the first letter of every word (sometimes aside from minor linking words like a, the, or is) is capitalized. Wikipedia does this because its editors consider sentence case to be more natural and intuitive for both the writer and the reader, which it prioritizes as a contributor-heavy informational site. For the same reason, and because the built-in frameworks of a Wiki use it too, The Build-A-Bear Wiki prefers the use of sentence case for page titles and headings.
  • USE: Furry friends released in 2024; Doctor Who collection
  • AVOID: Furry Friends Released In 2024; Doctor Who Collection

Where trademarks are given in nonstandard capitalization, generally speaking, these should be converted to title case. The exception to this is when they are consistently and reliably referred to using the nonstandard capitalization (useful examples from Wikipedia include: KISS should be converted to Kiss, but iPod should stay as iPod) - however, this is not usually the case for Build-A-Bear products.
  • USE: Skoosherz; Scentiments; Smallfrys
  • AVOID: SKOOSHERZ™; SCENTiments; smallfrys

For more details on capitalization in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters.


Dates

To avoid confusion based on differing date formats (MMDDYYYY vs. DDMMYYYY, etc), always format dates with the month written out. Because Build-A-Bear is an American company, writing dates as "Month Date, Year" is preferred for bear infoboxes and page body text; however, in minor areas such as source citations, feel free to use the format you are accustomed to, as long as it cannot be misunderstood by those from cultures that use different date formats.
  • USE: October 27, 1997
  • USE WITH CAUTION: Dec 2, 2023; Feb 09 2004; November 17 '99; 12 February 2023; 8 Mar 1999; 30 Dec 08
  • AVOID: 2/2/2008; 2003/4/12; 06/30/1997


Edit summaries

Please try to add summaries for any edit you make to any page. They don't need to be in too much detail, but it helps future bearchivists in case they need to roll back changes or track your edits for any reason. There's less need to do this in personal pages in your namespace (essays, for example), but do your best to remember to do it any time you make edits to regular pages.

Furry friend pages

Page name

While, as mentioned above (#Capitalization), The Build-A-Bear Wiki prefers sentence case for page titles, the page titles of furry friends usually override this, because many of the key details used to name the pages (floor name, edition, release year, collection, and location) end up being proper nouns that are capitalized in normal sentences anyways. The most likely reason you would have to use sentence case in a furry friend's name is in regards to location. Where Build-A-Bear uses non-title-case capitalization for a product, defer to the community to see whether the special case is usually used in reference to the product, or whether it's usually written in a normal sentence or title case. You can always add a note about the way the name is stylized in the lead section of the page.
  • USE: Toadally Tie-Dye Frog
  • AVOID: TOADally Tie-Dye Frog

Avoid using qualities that might change over time to name furry friends' pages - this is kinder to future bearchivists who might have to change a page name and edit all the pages that link to it if that quality changes later.
  • USE: Woodland Friends Fox; Keepsake Teddy (2023)
  • AVOID: Online exclusive Fox; Keepsake Teddy (UK exclusive)

You can use special characters in page names when they are part of the bear's official product name, but avoid using trademark (™) and registered trademark (®) symbols. If a bear does require special characters in its page name, please also set up a secondary redirect by making a new page without the special characters and placing #REDIRECT [[Bear's page name with normal special characters]] in the body text.
  • USE: Pawlette; Build-A-Bear Buddies Boo-rific Ghost; Día de los Muertos Bear
  • AVOID: Pawlette™; Build-A-Bear Buddies™ Boo-rific Ghost; Dia de los Muertos Bear


Infobox

When formatting release dates in the infobox, use Month Day, Year format with the month written out in full. When a bear was available in multiple regions but your release date only applies to one, or if a bear was available in store and you only have the online release date, specify this in parentheses, e.g. October 27, 1997 (US) or December 26, 2023 (Online AU). If you have multiple release dates, separate them by line breaks.
  • USE: October 27, 1997 (US); March 2005; December 26, 2023 (Online AU)
  • AVOID: Oct 27, 1997; 03/05; 26 December 2023

When listing countries a furry friend was available in, use two-letter abbreviations. A list of relevant abbreviations can be found below.
  • AE = United Arab Emirates
  • AU = Australia
  • BE = Belgium
  • BH = Bahrain
  • BR = Brazil
  • CA = Canada
  • CH = China
  • CL = Chile
  • DE = Germany
  • DK = Denmark
  • FR = France
  • HK = Hong Kong
  • IE = Ireland
  • IN = India
  • IT = Italy
  • JP = Japan
  • KR = South Korea
  • KW = Kuwait
  • MX = Mexico
  • NL = Netherlands
  • NO = Norway
  • NZ = New Zealand
  • OM = Oman
  • PR = Puerto Rico
  • QA = Qatar
  • RU = Russia
  • SE = Sweden
  • SG = Singapore
  • TH = Thailand
  • TR = Turkey
  • TW = Taiwan
  • US = USA
  • UK = United Kingdom
  • ZA = South Africa

For consistency, The Build-A-Bear Wiki has a standard order for countries, which is listed below (with countries Build-A-Bear presently has workshops in bolded for ease of finding). Roughly, this order represents non-franchise countries, followed by countries grouped into regions: Australasia, Europe, the Middle East, Latin/South America, Africa, and Asia (including Russia); within these regions, countries with active Workshop locations are placed earlier in the list. Countries (and the prices for each country) should be listed in this order.
  • US, CA, UK, IE, PR, AU, NZ, IT, FR, DE, NL, BE, DK, SE, NO, AE, KW, QA, BH, OM, TR, CL, MX, BR, ZA, CH, HK, JP, KR, TW, TH, SG, IN, RU


Gallery sorting

Galleries in furry friends' pages don't need to be arranged in a particular order. The Build-A-Bear Wiki has some order suggestions, though!
  • Bundles: Simpler bundles (i.e. those with fewer items) first, followed by more complex bundles (i.e. those with more items)
  • Gallery: Official product photos first (primary photo first, then alt photos), then community sourced photos, screenshots of product pages and digital collector's guides, scans or photos of catalogues and print collector's guides, and finally scans or screenshots of birth certificates

Collection pages

Page name

As with furry friend page names, collection page names should use sentence case (see #Capitalization for more on sentence case), and the official trademark names from Build-A-Bear can be in the normal title case. In general, you'll want to capitalize the first letter of the collection title and the first letter of any word that is an official Build-A-Bear trademark, and leave everything else lowercase. Acronyms can stay normally capitalized.
  • USE: Furry friends released in 2024; PAW Patrol collection
  • AVOID: Furry Friends Released In 2024; Paw Patrol Collection

And as with furry friend page names, please avoid the use of trademark or registered trademark characters (™ & ®) in collection page names. Ampersands (&) may be used when they are part of a trademark, but otherwise please write out the word "and."
  • USE: Sanrio Hello Kitty & Friends collection; Sheep and goats
  • AVOID: Sanrio Hello Kitty & Friends® collection; Sheep & goats


{{Bearlist}} vs {{Bigbearlist}}

At the moment there is no specific rule for when to use Template:Bearlist and when to use Template:Bigbearlist; however, the general guidance is that Bearlist's smaller images better suit lists with large numbers of bears, as the smaller images allow the reader to do less scrolling, whereas Bigbearlist can be used for lists with fewer bears, since the size of image less impacts the browsing experience when there are fewer bears to scroll through. A list of furry friends released in a given year, for example, would always use {{Bearlist}}, but a collection with only four bears would be suitable for {{Bigbearlist}}.


Gallery sorting

In a small, informal poll conducted in r/buildabear's associated Discord server, 30 out of 33 respondents (90.9%) indicated a desire to browse collections in chronological order, 5 out of 33 (15.2%) indicated a desire to browse alphabetically, and 2 out of 33 (6.1%) indicated that it would depend on the collection (neither respondent gave examples). The Build-A-Bear Wiki therefore prefers chronological order for most collections, in most circumstances. Bearchivists can use page headings to subdivide the collection (such as by plush size, by genera or species in species-based collections, or by character in licensed collections) if they subjectively feel that chronological order makes the page too difficult to navigate or individual bears too difficult to find.

Images

Filenames

Image filename consistency is not remotely as high a priority as preserving information on The Build-A-Bear Wiki, but if you want to aim for consistency, the following is recommended:

Name main product images to match the bear's page title, with abbreviations or release year if necessary.

  • Example: How to Train Your Dragon Toothless (2014)'s main image is titled HowToTrainYourDragonToothless(2014).jpg, but it could also be HTTYDToothless.jpg, Toothless14.jpg, or some other reasonable permutation.

Give additional product images the same name as the main product image, but with either numbers or -alt appended on the end before the extension (jpg, gif, png).

  • Example: Brown Cow's main product image is BrownCow.jpg, so its additional image is called BrownCow-Alt.jpg, but could equally be BrownCow2.jpg or BrownCow-2.jpg.

Give bundle images the same name as the main product image, but with -bundle or -bundle and numbers appended on the end before the extension.

  • Example: Rainbow Party Bear's main product image is RainbowPartyBear23.jpg, so its bundle images are called RainbowPartyBear23-bundle.jpg and RainbowPartyBear23-bundle2.jpg.


Citations

For images, we request sourcing information to be present in the description of the image rather than on a page featuring the image - this allows the source information to be accessed easily from any page the image is used on. Official product photos and graphics from Build-A-Bear do not need to be cited (though we would sure appreciate it if you could provide a source!), but all other images, such as photos pulled from Worthpoint, Ebay, or Facebook, should be sourced appropriately.

Ideally, citations in the form of links would be given in our standard referencing format (see below #Citations & references), but simply pasting the link is acceptable in a pinch.
If you were personally given the photo to use (or you took it yourself), cite the name or username of the person who took the photo. If a photo was edited, cite the name or username of the person who edited the photo. The exact layout of the citation is not as important as each party involved in the photo being correctly credited for their contributions.

Citations & references

General

To avoid clutter, particularly in the infobox, The Build-A-Bear Wiki prefers to cite product pages just once, after the product description pulled from the page in question, and have it be implicitly understood that other information such as countries and price come from the appropriate pages. For product pages that have no descriptions, it's preferred to add the citation after the country's abbreviation in the Countries section of the infobox. Example: NZ[1]

If a piece of information comes from an object you own, whether that's a bear, a birth certificate, a brochure, etc, and you haven't shared a picture of this object anywhere else that can be cited, please upload a relevant photo of that object to the Wiki (using Special:Upload or the red link shortcut) and either cite the image(s) on the bear's page as evidence or include the images in the bear's gallery, which serves the same purpose of evidencing the information.


Link styling

To balance effort, legibility, and informativity, the preferred style for link citations is to use the page title as the text of the link, and after the link to use optional details to flesh the citation out. The page title can be viewed and copied manually by hovering your cursor over the correct tab in your browser, or it can be quickly copied by saving the page to your bookmarks, CTRL+C (or Apple+C) copying the title, and then unsaving the bookmark.

For pages preserved on Wayback Machine, include the year the capture was taken in parentheses after the link (and after the country abbreviation, if present).

For product pages where the country name isn't in the page title, include the country abbreviation in parentheses after the link and before the year the capture was taken.

For citations from sites like the BAB Digital Birth Cert, include the date you accessed the site, in case it updates after you accessed it and the information you retrieved is either lost or altered.

For citations from Reddit, the default page title does not always attach the classic "r/" identifier to the subreddit name; The Build-A-Bear Wiki prefers to add the r/ identifier in where absent to improve legibility.


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