The Build-A-Bear Wiki:Style guide

• 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" (e.g. October 27, 1997) 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 other cultures (e.g. 12 February 2023 is acceptable, but 12/2/23 is not).
• Bearlist vs Bigbearlist: At the moment there is no specific guideline for when to use Template:Bearlist and when to use Template:Bigbearlist; however, the general wisdom 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.
• Image filenames: Image filename consistency is not remotely as high a priority as actually preserving information here, but if you want to aim for consistency, The Build-A-Bear Wiki recommends the following:
  • Main product images are named to match the bear's page title, with abbreviations or release year if necessary. Examples: 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.
  • Additional product images are given the same name as the main product image, but with either numbers or -alt appended on the end before the extension. Example: Brown Cow's main product image is BrownCow.jpg, so its additional image is called BrownCow-Alt.jpg.
  • Bundle images are given 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.
• Gallery sorting:
• Citation 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.
  • For product pages where the country name isn't in the page title, include the country abbreviation in parentheses after the link.
  • 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 citations from Reddit, the default page title uses the subreddit name without including the classic r/ identifier; The Build-A-Bear Wiki prefers to add the r/ identifier in to improve legibility.
  • Examples of preferred citation style: Ted Lasso Bear Sunglasses Bundle | Shop at Build-A-Bear® (US) (2023), New bear available - 31st May 2023 : r/buildabear
  • 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: ZA^[1]
  • If a piece of information comes from an object you own, whether that's a bear, a birth certificate, a brochure, etc, 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.