Bulbapedia talk:Manual of style

Bulbapedia talk:Manual of style

This talk page is designed for discussions about the contents of the manual of style
and questions or proposals regarding Bulbapedia's style conventions and norms.

Archived discussions: 1

Italics and quotation marks

Maybe we can try to use italics and quotation marks for all kinds of titles in a more standard way? Last year, we discussed this a little bit. There are also a couple of older discussions above about this (#Why aren't titles formatted here? posted in 2016; #Italicized episode titles posted in 2020).

I suppose this would mean at least:

• italics for titles of games like Pokémon Legends: Arceus, manga series like Pokémon Adventures, anime series like Pokémon Origins, and anime films like Pokémon 4Ever
• quotation marks for titles of anime episodes like "Pokémon Emergency!" and manga chapters like "A Glimpse of the Glow"

This would involve editing templates that link to those kinds of titles, like Template:game2.

As far as official text is concerned, it seems at least the gen 4 and 5 game manuals use italics for game titles in running text, like in the quote:

• "This is the Pokémon Black Version. The types and likelihood of Pokémon that appear differ from Pokémon White Version."

Anyway, to be fair, the gen 1-3 game manuals seem to use no italics in this manner anyway (as far as I have seen).

As mentioned in the previous discussion, arguably the italics looks better in running text at least for the Let's Go! games, making it clear that the exclamation point is part of the game title as opposed to regular punctuation:

• In Let's Go! Pikachu and Eevee, Jessie and James appear.
• In Let's Go! Pikachu and Eevee, Jessie and James appear.

It seems the other NIWA wikis also use italics and quotation marks this way, like Super Mario World (video game), The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! (TV series), and "Mario and the Beanstalk" (episode from the TV series).

Looks like the Pokémon TCG manual uses italics for TCG series and expansions like Sword & Shield-Fusion Strike (this one seen on page 27). In other official pages like this from Pokémon.com, this kind of italics can also be seen in running text.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts or opinions so far. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 07:05, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Just expanding on this that Pokémon itself should probably be italicized when referring to the franchise or series as a whole. Landfish7 21:25, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I agree with you about italicizing the franchise name Pokémon. Here's an example of a franchise name being italicized in another NIWA wiki: Super Mario (franchise). --Daniel Carrero (talk) 21:34, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm in favor of making these changes. Storm Aurora (talk) 03:38, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Agree - I would really like to see these changes made. Italic and quotation formatting is standard on other wikis, and its absence here makes our articles look unpolished in comparison. If we lived in a world where Bulbapedia already included this formatting, I couldn't think of a strong enough argument for removing it. Paper Luigi (talk) 03:16, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

I personally don't like the whole "other wiki does it, why don't we" reasoning, let Bulbapedia be Bulbapedia. We don't need to follow everyone else. That said, if we were to italicize series, games etc.., I can't see why episode titles shouldn't. I would have assumed they'd fall under "titles".--ForceFire 06:42, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

Standard writing convention. Books, journals, and the like get italics, shorter works, such as articles and poems within a collection get quotation marks. Eragon4 (talk) 23:51, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

This site has a pretty comprehensive list of what should be italicized and what should use quotation marks in formal writing. One in case particular I want to mention, since it's something covered on Bulbapedia but hasn't been brought up in this conversation yet, is that song titles should be written in quotation marks, ex. "Born to Be a Winner" or "One, Two, Three". Storm Aurora (talk) 00:45, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

As Paper Luigi said, they have a more specific grievance and it's that they believe it makes the site look less polished. That's more than just "other wiki does it, why don't we".

I think it's less about mindlessly following the example of other wikis and more so broaching the idea of 'well if all these other wikis do this, they likely have specific reasons to; we should evaluate those and see if they fit well for us also'. In this case, it's because this style of formatting is a common professional writing standard. Driftin Soul (talk) 04:17, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

I'm in favor of this. Italics and quotes for titles is a very good way to distinguish titles from other text and improves overall readability, and I believe in many cases at least related to games, this would be a relatively painless change to make given Bulbapedia's heavy usage of link templates. Anime articles might possibly need a lot more cleanup, as I believe those links are not so often formatted using link templates, but I could be mistaken.

Regardless, I think it would be a good change to make, high volume of manual work or no. Driftin Soul (talk) 04:22, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Generally, current Bulbapedia leadership is in favor of the change. We do, however, recognize that it's pretty much an aesthetic change vs something that's correcting inaccurate content or problematic layouts that prevent people from reading the content that's written. For that reason, it's not exactly something we wish to prioritize currently. There are certain steps we can take to eventually reach that goal (something is coming up reforming how we link to episode articles). But in regards to the change, the response is more of a "not now" instead of a "not ever". ^Maverick_Nate 05:19, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Good to get your opinion in this matter, Maverick Nate, and I'm happy that Bulbapedia leadership approves of this change! However, I am feeling mixed feelings about where you go from there. Could you begin by citing your sources for the "not now" consensus you have drawn up for your conclusion? I invite the supporters of your "not now" statement to bring out their opinions here for this "aesthetic" change to the manual of style that they are in favor of. It seems that everyone who has participated in this thread has more or less accepted the conventional belief that italic and quotation formatting be accepted here, but I am not familiar in how the minds of the leadership on Bulbapedia think. Paper Luigi (talk) 05:45, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

There are two steps to making a change to the manual of style: editing the page and implementing the change across the wiki. As Driftin Soul noted above, implementing this change will require a lot of work to make sure everything is properly adjusted to the new formatting style. You know the suggestion to capitalize Evolution that was made last year? We're still working on implementing that across all pages on the wiki. Implementing this formatting change will undoubtedly take a long time as well, so we'll need to come up with a good plan to tackle it. But we've got a bunch of other improvement projects in the works right now, and we'd like to wrap some of those up before starting on this one. So, since we can't implement the change right now, we're not going to edit the manual of style to say "always italicize game titles" when we don't actually do that anywhere on the wiki.

tl;dr: It's on our to-do list! Our to-do list is just very long... Storm Aurora (talk) 15:51, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

I'm glad to know that this change is on your to-do list. It's a good one, and it's been a long time coming. For the sake of clarity, could you share what other items are still on the to-do list? I'd volunteer my time to help with your efforts if you would. Paper Luigi (talk) 05:14, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

The majority of the items on staffs' to-do list right now are behind-the-scenes preparations corresponding to tech upgrades to the encyclopedia, and coordinating various breaking news content, such as the ZA demo available starting today, and the events happening at the World Championships, and any resulting announcements at the closing ceremonies. When we have something additional to communicate on how the general userbase can assist, we'll communicate it through Bulbapedia:Messages from the Editor. ^Maverick_Nate 14:13, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

italics for titles of franchises/shows/games and quote marks for titles of episodes/chapters is standard fare across the web and i had always wondered why Bulbapedia doesn't use the same standards lmao. i'm down with implementing this in the MoS. anZAsquiddles 2222(:D)SSSS (talk) 16:18, 13 August 2025 (UTC)