Yezur Wiki:Conventions

This page collects the editorial and structural conventions of the Yezur Wiki — a working reference for new editors, human and AI alike. The wiki is the single source of truth for the world of Yezur; these are the habits that keep it consistent.

The cardinal rule

A fact is canon only once it is written onto a wiki page. Conversation, agreement, and brainstorming are not canon until they land here.

Editorial voice

Articles in the main namespace are written as an encyclopedia by Yezuri, for Yezuri readers. Two requirements, always together:

• Encyclopedic register. Neutral and third-person, definition-first, like any good reference work. No storytelling, no chatty asides, no first- or second-person address to the reader, no marketing or how-to tone.
• In-world (Watsonian) frame. Written from inside Yezur. Never break frame: no comparisons to the real world, no asides to the real reader, no mention of the design process or the tools used to build the wiki.

No real-world references

Yezur is not Earth. Do not invoke real civilizations, cultures, religions, writing systems, landmarks, or figures by their real-world names — no "Latin script", no "Romanized", no real place or people names. Analogy is welcome: monarchies, pottery, navigation, cathedrals and countless familiar concepts exist here in recognizable forms — but each should feel grown from Yezur's own history, not lifted from a specific real culture.

The Earth test

Write about Yezur the way Wikipedia writes about Earth: as the world, not a world. Wherever "Yezur" or "Yezuri" appears, the sentence should still read as a natural Wikipedia sentence with "Earth" in its place. Wikipedia's article on Basque does not say the language has "no clear cognates in any other Earth language" — so ours must not say "in any other Yezuri language". Qualify by planet only where Wikipedia would: "loanwords drawn from languages across Yezur" passes the test ("languages across Earth"); a reflexive "Yezuri" in front of every other noun does not.

No magic

No supernatural forces or spellcraft act on the physical world. In-world myths and folk beliefs may exist without being literally true.

Plausible mechanics

Biology, geology, and climate behave as in reality, and the cosmos is the real one; only the specifics — species, peoples, surface geography — are Yezuri.

Familiar to the second level

Much of Yezur matches Earth up to the second-most specific level. The broad kinds are shared: there are zebras, though not Earth's zebra species; crops, instruments, institutions and dress all have close counterparts. Some things transfer essentially whole — many sports exist just as on Earth, at worst under mildly different rules or disciplines. What never transfers is the Earth-specific pedigree: the exact species, the founding story, the name that honours an Earth place or person. However familiar the thing itself, its origin and history are Yezur's own. This is the constructive side of no real-world references: take the familiar kind, and give Yezur its own instance of it.

Where out-of-frame content goes

Real-world commentary — design rationale, comparisons, notes on tooling, unresolved questions — never appears in article text. It belongs on Talk pages, in the Meta: namespace, or in this Yezur Wiki: namespace.

Namespaces

Namespace	Frame	Purpose
(Main), Dictionary:, Map:	In-character	Encyclopedia articles, the dictionary, and the map wiki
Yezur Wiki:	Out-of-frame	Policy, style, and conventions (this page)
Meta:	Out-of-frame	Design notes and rationale
Talk: (all)	Out-of-frame	Discussion and open threads

Rule of thumb: everything a reader or editor sees is in-character, except the Meta:, Talk:, and Yezur Wiki: namespaces. That includes template, module, and category names — see Naming.

Who edits as whom

Every editor has a distinct account, so authorship is clear at a glance in page history:

• Yezur — the human editor, working in the browser.
• Khurouan and Thiorosan — interactive AI authors, the same role from different workstations; separate accounts so an edit can be traced to the agent that made it.
• Alompan — the automated daily-maintenance routine (see Yezur Wiki:Daily routine).

(The bot accounts share their names with the ancient cities of Hertia.)

Keep edit summaries in-character where you reasonably can — describe the change to the article ("Start an article on the Hertic language"), not the process behind it.

Naming

• Language articles use the "X language" form (e.g. Gaillean language). Native names and other aliases become redirects.
• Categories follow real-encyclopedia habits but drop the global "of Yezur" — we would not write "Rivers of Earth", so we write Continents, not "Continents of Yezur". Keep narrower place qualifiers, such as "Countries in Andusia".
• Templates, modules, and categories are in-character too. Avoid real-world terms in their names; encyclopedia-furniture words (Infobox, Cite, Stub, Navbox) are fine, since the in-world encyclopedia uses them about itself.

Text formatting

Wikipedia's Manual of Style on text formatting applies here, overwhelmingly. In particular:

• Boldface marks the article's subject — and its significant alternative names and redirect targets — at first mention, and almost nothing else. Do not bold terms for emphasis.
• Italics carry their usual duties: words as words, native-language forms, titles of works — and only sparing emphasis.

Categories

Categories form a nested hierarchy — and, being a directed graph, a category may have more than one parent. Broad topics branch into specific sub-categories; a page joins the most specific categories that apply, not a flat top-level bucket. Entity-type categories nest inside topic branches: a country in Andusia sits in a "Countries in Andusia" category that is a child of both "Andusia" and "Countries".

Intersection categories are welcome wherever they aid navigation — "Former countries in Andusia" or "2002 deaths" are perfectly valid. Only hyper-specific slices no reader would browse — "polities in Andusia founded before a given year" — are left unbuilt: neither a category nor a list.

Infoboxes and structured data

• Each entity type has its own infobox, kept granular: Template:Infobox former country is separate from the living-state Template:Infobox polity, so each carries only the fields that matter to it.
• Prefer the more specific infobox when the subject warrants one — an orchestra is a valid case for a new infobox even where a broader musical-artist infobox already exists — but ask the operator before creating a new infobox, as with categories.
• Infoboxes render through the shared Lua module Module:Infobox and one stylesheet, Template:Infobox/styles.css.
• Infoboxes are display only — they file nothing into a database. Lists, member rosters, and cross-references are written and maintained by hand, curated like any prose; the daily routine cross-checks them against the articles they summarise. (Cargo was retired from the encyclopedia in 2026-07: query-driven lists sat stale in the parser cache, could never show a page that did not yet exist, and read as machinery where an encyclopedia wants curation.)
• The one deliberate exception is the Dictionary: {{head}} files each entry into the Lexemes Cargo table — see Yezur Wiki:Dictionary structure. Any change to its schema needs a one-time administrative rebuild ("recreate data") on Template:Head.

Open threads

Unresolved questions, placeholder names, and deliberate dangling references are recorded as plain text on the article's Talk page, under an == Open threads == heading — never as hidden markers inside the article.

Maintenance

• Flagging for deletion. The editing bots hold no delete right, so pages awaiting removal are tagged, not deleted. Put {{delete|reason}} (Template:Delete) on a page to show a deletion banner and file it into Category:Pages flagged for deletion — the queue an administrator (Yezur) works through. Remove the tag to keep the page.
• Auphen errors. Dictionary pages whose {{auphen}} pronunciation cannot be resolved collect in Category:Auphen errors for review.

Maps

• Link to the Yezur map with {{Node}}, {{Way}}, and {{Relation}} (by object id), or {{Coords}} / {{Coordslink}} (by coordinates).
• A subject that resolves to a single point on the map takes {{On the map|lat|lon}} (Template:On the map) on its first line: it places a link beside the page title rather than inline, and takes effect once per page — where it appears more than once, the last use wins. Continents and countries, which cannot be reduced to a single point, do not take it.

Files

• Files are categorised, like pages — a file joins the most specific categories that apply, and file categories are in-character like every other (see Naming). Category:Files is the top-level container they hang from.
• A source or licence line is recorded where one is needed. Where nothing outside the wiki places a condition on a file's use, none is written.

Sourcing

Cite sources with <ref>...</ref>, collected by a <references /> tag in a references section.

Notes for AI agents

Agents run locally, each editing through its own account — Khurouan and Thiorosan for the interactive workstations, Alompan for the daily routine. The agent accounts are gathered in Category:Agent accounts. Additional operating context — the project setup, the who-edits-as-whom rule, and this convention set — lives in each workstation's CLAUDE.md. Always read the relevant page(s) before asserting canon, and surface every write you make.