Muppet Wiki:Style Guide

Keep the following principles in mind when editing articles to help keep the style as consistent as possible. While the wiki environment means someone might fix mistakes and make things compliant eventually, we have 45,785 pages and far fewer editors than comparatively bigger projects, so every little bit helps!

Basics

Muppet Wiki uses the same language to format its style and layout that Wikipedia and other MediaWiki projects use: Wiki markup (otherwise known as Wikitext or Wikicode). Fandom's Help:Contents have some useful pages on how to use this, as does Wikipedia:Help:Wikitext.

While this page serves as a guideline for how we at Muppet Wiki style our articles, the number one thing to remember about formatting when you're not sure, is to look at an existing article for a topic similar to the one you're about to create. Copy the relevant code from the article's edit window, paste to the new article, and make the appropriate changes. This can include wiki markup, categories, sorting, layout, tables, infoboxes, citing sources, where to place quotes, italics, etc.

Grammar

Entries are expected to be made with proper grammar, capitalization, and spacing. The Muppet Wiki community is not as vast as Wikipedia, so your expectation can't be that someone else will come along and fix additions made in haste. Users with excessive violations may see their good faith additions reverted, so please do your best to thoughtfully construct sentence structure.

Some other best practices to keep in mind:

• Remember to capitalize the letter M on the word "Muppet".

• Present dates in full: December 11, 1992. Link to the year to allow access to the timeline (and add a reference to the relevant year article if necessary).

• Use American spelling (which favors "z" spellings such as "organize" rather than "organise", and "o" spellings such as "color" rather than "colour").

• Punctuation belongs inside quotation marks. For example:

Kermit sings "Bein' Green." is correct.

Kermit sings "Bein' Green". is incorrect.

Apostrophes

• An apostrophe does not accompany any word that ends in s. Here are a few examples of proper usage:

• Charles Grodin appeared in 1990's The Muppets at Walt Disney World.
• Applause manufactured Sesame Street piggy banks in the late 1990s.
• Applause manufactured Sesame Street piggy banks in the late '90s.
• The DVD's features include a photo gallery and commentary track.
• The Muppet Show was released on a series of DVDs by Time-Life.

• In cases where apostrophes should be used in words that end in s, please use AP style:

• correct: Santa Claus' sleigh
• incorrect: Santa Claus's sleigh

• How to link apostrophes.

Names and Titles

Capitalization in page names can be tricky. We borrowed the following rules from superheronation.com.

Lowercase

• articles: a, an, the
• coordinate conjunctions: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so
• most prepositions: at, by, for, from, of, on, to, with, without

Uppercase

• The first and last words should always be capitalized, even if they're in the above list.
• All nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs should be capitalized.
• subordinate conjunctions: after, as, because, how, who, if, than, what, why, that, when, where, whether, while
• longer prepositions relating to location/position: above, among, below, beneath, between, beyond, under
• Commonly missed words: it (pronoun), is (verb), be (verb) and their/our/my (adjective) should all be capitalized.

Formatting

• Songs go in quotes: "C is for Cookie"

• Album titles are italicized: Bert's Blockbusters, Abbey Road

• Movie titles are italicized: The Dark Crystal

• The name of a TV series is italicized, and the episode goes in quotes: the Fraggle Rock episode "The Terrible Tunnel" (episodes without formal titles have different rules):

• The Muppet Show episode 308 — referring to the guest star twice in a sentence would be awkward, so we use the production number; episode is lowercase because it is not a formal title.
• Sesame Street Episode 1839 — "Episode" is capitalized here because the number serves as the formal episode title as seen on the title card in front of nearly every episode.

• In/On (CE discussion)

Links

• In most cases, multiple links to the same article in close proximity to each other is discouraged (in paragraphs, for example). Exceptions include links appearing under multiple headers or in image captions. Readers often skip down to the information that interests them and tend to look over pictures first. Not providing links to relevant articles in these cases (even when they've already been linked in the article) would fail to direct the reader to relevant topics. Readers shouldn't be expected to know that a link was provided in an earlier section of the article or have to do a separate search.

• Check whether links exist before creating them. There's nothing wrong with linking to non-existent articles, but the article may in fact exist under a slightly different name.

• Be especially careful with capitalization in links. A link to The Case of the Missing Mother is different from a link to The Case Of The Missing Mother.

• Include appropriate category links in new articles (check the Category list if you're not sure which ones to use).

Anchored links

An anchored link is when you link to a section of an article. These are automatically generated by having a header section in the article, for example, placing a hashtag followed by the name of the section in the Kermit article — Kermit_the_Frog#Changing_Performers — takes you right to the Changing Performers section.

We can add custom tags to articles, but the code is a bit more tricky. For example, Super_Grover#barber takes you right to the place in the sketch table that covers the "barber" segment without needing a section header there. These are the things you need to remember when creating them and should only be used by advanced wiki editors:

• To help combat Wikia's finicky visual editors, we use the {{divid}} template to keep the code consistent. Place the template within the wikicode that signals the beginning of the cells in the table you want to link. Using the example above, it would look like this: |-

• The unique tags — in the example, barber — need to be very simple in order for the URL to work properly. Avoid spaces between words, capital letters, and special characters such as apostrophes.

• If these tags have been established on an article for some time, don't change them, as there's no easy way to use Special:Whatlinkshere to fix them unless you go through the code of every page linking to the article to see if that tag has been used. Changing the smallest factor of the tag will discontinue its functionality.

Date links

Date links should be used when the subject of the article has a specific release date or appearance date. The easiest way to think about it is: A timeline page has a set of links on it, listing events that happened that year. When you click "what links here", the list of pages that link to the year should match up with what's listed on the page. (CE discussion)

• The best example is for books, records, episodes, movies and specials. Those pages have one date linked -- for example, The Monster at the End of This Book has a link to 1971 in the infobox. Other dates mentioned on the page don't get linked, including reissues of the book. Only the first publication date is linked.

• TV appearances -- Link for the date that a Muppet appeared, but not for other dates. "The Tonight Show has been running continuously since 1953" wouldn't be linked; "Kermit and Miss Piggy appeared on the show in 1979" would be linked.

• Song pages -- Songs written for the Muppets or Sesame Street get a date link in the infobox. Songs that the Muppets covered (like most Muppet Show songs) don't get a date link.

• Individual people or characters don't get any date links. (This is the one exception to the general rule listed at the top -- a birth or death date of a performer might be listed on the timeline page, but they don't get linked from the person's page. Ditto for a character's first appearance.)

• There should never be date links in captions, galleries or references.

External links

Please don't add links to Amazon or other commercial sites. It's nice to help other Muppet fans find the cool products that are available, but we don't want to look like we're trying to sell things. We also don't want to open the possibility to people posting sponsored Amazon links, or links to their own Ebay store. If a product is currently in print and available, you can note that in the article. If that inspires readers to buy the product, then they can find it online themselves. Only link to a commercial site as a means of citing a source.

In the case of legitimate external links, sometimes these expire because the website has either moved or retired the article. If you find one, rather than removing it, check to see if an archive service has the link backed up. archive.org and archive.li are good long-term solutions, while Google Cache may have more recent content.

Red links

Links that are colored red indicate that an article does not yet exist on the wiki for that specific text. In general practice, any topic that falls within our coverage would get an article on the wiki, so "redlinking" to a location that does not yet have an article would, generally speaking, fall within reason. However, because Fandom (our web host) has limited Special:WantedPages to 1,000 items, an effort is made to only redlink topics that are likely to have pages in the near future. This is to help keep WantedPages from overflowing from the limit too much.

For example, new characters, writers, performers (etc) who don't have articles yet, are okay to redlink because they are likely to have pages more imminently than some others. An actor who appeared in a Creature Shop movie several years ago may eventually get an article on the wiki, but they aren't very likely to get one soon. If they do, a wiki search can be performed to link them to the new article after it's been created.

This practice is not an exact science, but based more on what the current trends of the community are at the moment. As in most other situations, if you're unsure whether a topic should be redlinked or not, ask the veteran editors and admins in the Forum:Index.

For a list of previously redlinked topics that were "de-redlinked" to help assuage the WantedPages limit, see Sandbox:WantedPages. A list that expands beyond the 1,000 item cap is also available, but be aware that this was manually generated in August 2022 and will not reflect new redlinks created since then beyond the limit.

Editing

• Edit summaries are helpful for explaining your edits: why you're removing, changing, or adding something. (CE discussion)

• Wikia offers three editing modes. The first is simple code, and the other two are WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors:

1. wikicode (or source editor)
2. Rich Text Editor
3. Visual Editor

Because Muppet Wiki was built before either of the WYSIWYG editors were developed, we recommend using wikicode. It's the same simple code Wikipedia uses, in fact simpler because we don't use the complicated templates commonly used on Wikipedia. Edits made with the two WYSIWYG editors developed by Wikia may not save your changes correctly and require clean-up from another editor. The option to choose which editor to use can be set in your Preferences (wikicode is referred to in the dropdown menu as "source editor").

• With the exception of fixes concerning grammar and factual accuracy, a non-administrative edit (to text or imagery) to be applied en masse to a large number of pages needs to be discussed on Forum:Index first, and must have an overwhelming or unanimous community consensus that is clearly expressed in writing before executing.

People coverage

• After a person is identified by their full name in an article, any following references should be made using their last name. One exception to this rule may be used when describing their involvement in a scene when they're playing themselves, for example, on The Muppet Show or Sesame Street. Their first name is used by the Muppet characters, and at this point, the actors themselves become characters in the play. When behind-the-scenes information is being described, the last name should again be used.

• The performer section of character infoboxes are for the main performer(s) of a character only. And only when that performer has been established with a character for 1) an extended period over 2) multiple productions (these two criteria are open for discussion on a case by case basis). Exceptions include when Sesame Workshop or Muppets Studio LLC (Disney) issues a formal press release (this is rare). Performer histories are covered in the article. See Talk:Janice, Talk:Sam the Eagle, Talk:Dr. Teeth, and others.

• On people articles, full birth/death dates (day, month, year) are typically reserved for people for whom Muppet Wiki serves as a primary biographical source: Jim Henson, Muppet performers, major contributors (frequent writers or composers, etc.), long-term Sesame Street cast, and the like. Celebrities and more occasional crew (as well as anyone merely referenced) are listed by years only, e.g. Bob Hope (1903-2003). Wikipedia and other sources cover those dates and other information in full, so Muppet Wiki tends to focus on the more Muppet-centric people.

• Related to that, while the aforementioned core crew get full biographies and generally include as many confirmed credits as possible, celebrities and others (including those who dubbed Muppets in other languages) get a few highlights and generally prioritize links to productions or co-stars who have pages. Exceptions are made sometimes for underdocumented individuals, but when Wikipedia, IMDB, and external databases cover the person's work well, those links suffice in place of listing what a given user thinks is their most important role. Likewise personal history such as multiple marriages or children are best left to other sites.

• Captions and text should refer to a person by their last name unless it's within the context of the appearance they were making where they were referred to by their first name by other characters. For example, Elmo refers to Whoopi Goldberg as "Whoopi" and Kermit refers to Gene Kelly as "Gene". The descriptive text should read Elmo and Whoopi discuss their hair and fur and Kermit gets a dancing lesson from Gene; while captions and history about the person should be Goldberg pictured with Kami at the United Nations and Kelly didn't want to do "Singin' in the Rain", but the show writers convinced him otherwise.

• Muppet Show guest bios (CE discussion)

• People should be sorted in categories by their last name first (where applicable). See #Categories for more.

• Celebrities — see: Category talk:Celebrities and Talk:Fraggle Rock Holiday Toy Drive Benefit

Performer dates

How to record dates for the first and last time someone performed a character when the production and broadcast dates are different:

• Start dates (Thread:285962)

In terms of when to use the production date vs the release date, it's best to make a determination on a case-by-case basis.

• End dates (Thread:259354#21)

If we have a verifiable and citable date (such as Jim Henson's death, Kevin Clash's resignation, or Caroll Spinney's retirement), then we use that date. We can explain in the article when/why they ceased being the performer and if material with them continued to be released after their departure (such as saying "Spinney retired from performing Big Bird in October 2018; new material featuring him as Big Bird continued to be released through 2020.").

But if there is no definitive source for a hard stop date (such as Jerry Nelson as Floyd), then we go with when their last performance was released and we don't try to speculate on when such material was filmed/produced or when they last put their hand in the puppet or spoke in their voice (such as simply saying "Nelson's last known performance as Floyd was dialog for the 2003 video game Muppets Party Cruise"... and we don't try to guess when those vocals may have been recorded or if he had ceased to be Floyd's performer prior to 2003).

Jim Henson was the performer of Guy Smiley until his death in 1990 (a strong citable stop date for Henson's tenure)... even if it's possible that he actually last touched the puppet in 1989 or if his performances weren't released until 1991.

Lyrics and Transcripts

• Posting the full lyrics to a song isn't allowed on the wiki; it's considered a violation of the songwriter's copyright, and that's a violation that is enforced more often than images or other potential violations. It's okay to quote selected lines from a song within the context of a larger article about that song, the songwriter, or the character.

• Don't make lists of quotes for favorite or famous lines. We don't want to become a quote database, and picking the best ones is subject to one's point of view. Quotes should be used in articles to illustrate a particular point.

• See Muppet Wiki:Transcripts

Organization

• The purpose of disambiguation pages is to redirect the user to the page they're looking for. When other links are included, it tends to confuse that process. As such, only the articles being disambiguated should be linked, and any other discernible information should be kept limited to the point that a visitor can determine which of the articles they are looking for. All other pertinent information and wiki links can be found in the following article. More on disambiguation: (CE discussion)

• Muppet Wiki:Templates shows some commonly used templates. Every template on the wiki can be found here.

• Infobox templates for music albums (records, tapes, CDs, etc) should only have the format, catalog number, label and cover image for the first release. All later releases (and their information) should go farther down in the "other releases" gallery.

• Break up longer articles with headings. We use the headings "External links", "Trivia", and "Sources" often.

Categories

• Every article should have a Category.

• The creation of new categories must first be discussed with the community at Forum:Index. Before considering a new category, check the Category list to see if there's a similar category that already exists.

• Articles for people should be sorted in categories by the last name. So, in the example to the right, sorting the Jim Henson article by Henson, Jim, allows for his page to show up in those categories under H. Similarly, pages beginning with The, A, and An should be sorted by the next word in the article title. For example, Muppet Movie, The or Cookie is a Sometime Food, A.

• {{DEFAULTSORT:}} can be used to automatically sort the article the same way in each category it's listed in. Locally sorting the category will override DEFAULTSORT, i.e. [[Category:Category Name|Custom Sort Text]]

• To link to a category within the body of the text without also placing the article in that category, place a colon after the opening brackets, like this... [[:Category:Celebrities]]

• Format for international categories -- keeping them separate from US categories -- not listing international releases in "Book appearances", "Audio releases", "Video releases".

Merchandise

Merchandise dates

For the most part, books, albums, toys and other merchandise should just have a year for the release date, without a specific month or day. Release dates for most items are approximate anyway -- a Harry Potter book makes a big hoopla about a specific release date, but Sesame Street storybooks and Muppet DVDs tend to drift out into stores over a period of weeks. The source for most dates is a retail store, usually Amazon, and that just tracks the date that Amazon happened to start selling the item. So most of the time, we should just have the year of release.

The exception is for projects in the In Development category -- for those pages, a specific date can help readers know when a book/album is supposed to come out. Those dates should be sourced as much as possible -- if the date comes from Amazon, then use a ref tag with a link to the Amazon page. When a project moves from the In Development category to the regular category, the specific date should be taken out, leaving just the year.

Writing style

• When summarizing fictional events that happened in a TV show, book, or film, the present tense is used unless explicitly dealing with a character's backstory prior to the episode. This rule applies even if the production follows characters over a certain length of time. The exception applies to character pages with long and detailed histories over a span of several (real life) years and projects. To quote Danny: "The point is that the writing always takes place in the present of the moment that you're writing about. If the episode that you're writing about shifts from one sentence to another, then the present tense follows it." (CE discussion)

• Another example of tense comes into play frequently when talking about an old production that's no longer being made. For example, even though Dallas has been off the air for decades, it still exists as a TV show. It didn't stop being a TV show when it went off the air. Therefore, "Dallas is a TV series that aired from 1978 to 1991..." is correct.

• Spoilers (CE discussion)

• When describing a Sesame Street segment or scene that is repeated in multiple episodes, and therefore appears in many of our episode guides, a short, concise summary of the segment is normally sufficient. Any revisions to the segment's description made on one page then needs to be applied to every page in which the description appears for consistency. In tandem with our en masse editing policy, such changes that are to be made to more than two pages need to be discussed on Forum:Index and agreed on by the community. Exceptions include notes in parenthises specifying edits or something else unique in how it appears in the episode.

Words and phrases to avoid

• "At one point Wembley does this." Describe the point at which you are referring with context so readers and other contributors can verify your addition.

• Do your best not to start every bulleted item in a list with...
  • "In a Letter of the Day game, Cookie Monster eats Prairie Dawn's violin and bow."
  • "In The Muppet Show episode 413, Slim Wilson asks Floyd and Zoot for directions to Carnegie Hall."
  • "In a Pepe's Profiles interview, Fozzie mentions he'd like to play Carnegie Hall one day."

Play around with the sentence structure so as not to make each item in the list sound so uniform.

• "Currently", "recently", "in recent years", and "upcoming". We're not likely to catch each occurrence of these phrases when they're no longer relevant. Also includes specific numbers on celeb pages for ongoing movie series, show seasons, or other items that need to be updated periodically. See Thread:238201

• "Also" and other connectors that have already been used in an article. Often, when adding new information to an article, it may seem prudent to continue a similar thought by saying something like, "Also, Henson did this in 1978," or whatever. Try to be aware of the language used elsewhere in the article, especially in the immediately preceding passage. This will avoid a whole series of subsequent sentences starting with "also this" and "also that". Be mindful of the writing structure that's already in place so that the text still flows as something readable. Sometimes an "Also" addition will make more sense as an "and" to an existing sentence. When referring to an earlier (often looser or more obscure) contribution from a person to a wiki covered production, "previously" is often more appropriate than also.

Relevance

Muppet Wiki is an encyclopedic project about the Muppets and every article is oriented around that focus or related ones (see Muppet Wiki:Coverage) to different degrees. As a result, additional quotes, facts, or trivia will be removed, even if sourced, when not directly relevant. A statement can be true without necessarily adding to a Muppet Wiki article. This applies even when quoting people who are relevant (puppeteers, Sesame Street cast) from interviews, podcasts, or social media. While we hope a lot of this will be evident, here's just a few "for instances," in additon to People coverage guidelines above.

• Detailed histories of a company's ownership are better left to Wikipedia. For corporate stuff in particular, Muppet Wiki uses the names at the time a given company/network/channel actually did anything related to the Muppets, ignoring subsequent mergers or name changes after the fact. Pending or possible name changes don't count until or unless they happen and the new name is actually on something with the Muppets.

• Basic information such as when a performer was born is relevant. A performer's favorite food is not.

• Podcast comments identifying additional performers or directly relevant information about a project are worth adding. Information not worth adding includes lengthy, quoted passages with repeated phrasing or tangents. Interviews are often built more on entertaining anecdotes and reminiscences rather than the factual approach Muppet Wiki uses. Memories about working on a project or with someone (first experience as a puppeteer, for example) are usually relevant. Passing sentences about enjoying meeting someone or having fun on a project are not, unless they lead in to factual info.

Web exclusive content

With the advent of the Internet, entertainment companies that had previously made content for film, television, and publications, etc, were no longer limited to those distribution models and began creating media that could be circulated exclusively for the web. In the early days, these often took the form of a web series, and — to use one example — episodes of From the Balcony were contained within a single title, and thus easy to cover as "a package" on the wiki. Much of this is covered within the subcategories in Category:Online Content.

Social media continued the trend of companies creating content exclusively for online distribution. The ease of making a single post, platform algorithms, a shift in trends for how audiences consume media, and other factors led to a rise in micro content not always tied to a larger theme that can be easily trackable on a wiki database. Much of this content is worth covering within the scope of Muppet Wiki:Coverage, but a challenge presents itself in how to justify an article for a single piece of 30 second media (or similar).

In cases where micro content can be logically grouped together, a theme should be decided on by the community (as discussed in Forum:Index) so as to more thoroughly cover the topic. A good example of this might be the YouTube videos created for The Best Friend Band; although they don't use a title card or weren't published in a defined playlist, it can be deduced by clearly unifying elements that these videos can be reasonably grouped together. Other content such as Instagram reels, TikToks, etc, may be more of a challenge for the community to figure out how to cover on the wiki and should also be discussed in the Forum. The intent here is that the content is covered on the wiki in some way, but dozens (or more) articles covering single, short videos should be avoided.

When possible, referencing a piece of web exclusive media on the wiki should always link to an internal wiki article rather than directly to the offsite link. This will ensure two things: that the reader can be provided with additional context from the wiki article, but also because these offsite links often expire, shift to private, or are removed from their platforms for various reasons; this "future proofs" the content by ensuring that it has been archived long after the official links are dead. External links can be used when a wiki article doesn't exist, but finding a way to cover the content on the wiki is encouraged. How to achieve this should be discussed in the Forum:Index before doing so.