Mystery Dungeon Franchise Wiki:Manual of Style (Project Organization)

The Mystery Dungeon Franchise Wiki (MDFW) began as a videogame wiki, and while that's no longer our sole focus, we do retain some aspects of that formatting. Each major videogame (barring 2000s cell phone games and spin-off apps or minigames) is given its own namespace. The various namespaces act as mini wikis for each subject, with consistent formatting across the board. This is intended to make navigation and finding relevant information easier, as people will be presented with info for the game they're actually playing, as opposed to digging through 20 other games worth of content, anime, manga lore, and whatever else that would otherwise be irrelevant to them. A user playing Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky most likely doesn't care about how to evolve Pikachu in Gates to Infinity, or where to find it in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red and Blue Rescue Team.

That's not to say we don't cover anime, manga, spin-offs, and other appearances or lore as well, it's just relegated to the lore namespace for the major series. Lore pages such as Mamel Family double as disambiguation pages that link to all of the various videogame-centered articles. The lore pages otherwise contain media galleries, anime and manga appearances, character bios, and so on. Videogame pages often have the "For/About" templates at the top of the page, which link to other versions of the same game, such as remakes, ports, or the original titles, and most importantly, the lore/disambiguation pages. That way, if a user does want to look at another game, they can visit the lore page's disambiguation section to see if other games have a page for said topic.

Some users ask why we don't mesh everything into single pages: It's far more complicated than it appears on the surface. We've looked at other wikis as examples, and have seen how it turns into a jumbled mess of information. The alternative requires readers to scroll to the top of the page to use the Table of Contents to find the section of the page that's relevant to them, every time they want to read about something else.

On top of it all, monster spawns, item spawns, and game mechanics vary wildly throughout the series which makes it difficult to document all in one page. Each game would need its own section to delve into the mechanic in detail; such as monster meat in Shiren the Wanderer. While Shiren 1 DS, Magic Castle DS, and Shiren 3 all feature meat, they function differently. Magic Castle DS has a turn limit that the other two games lack. Meat dropped into water in Shiren 1 DS will be lost, while it can be picked back up in Shiren 3, but will have turned into Rotten Meat. That's just one example. In the Shiren the Wanderer series, items, monsters, traps, and so on have had their names changed over the years which would lead to issues in deciding which name to link to on any given page. Monster level-up mechanics also vary wildly by game. Some items or monsters use the names of other monsters from the series, and so on.

There are a great many issues that we've outright avoided by documenting each game separately. We didn't just pull this formatting out of thin air and decide to die on this hill, a lot of thought and consideration has gone into it on our part, and there are numerous examples we can provide that show how complicated things would be if we were to mesh everything into a single page.