Help talk:Style

Tense and Point of View

Present or past? When? The current policy comes from looking at the series as literature and applying the convention that literature occurs in a perpetual present-tense. The events of the games happen as people play them, and we cannot assume that every person has already played every game. Alternatively, Memory Alpha's point of view places all in-universe descriptions in past-tense, from the perspective of an omniscient in-universe character looking back from the end of time. Currently our point of view is very inconsistent. We describe fictional events as if they actually happened, yet we frequently add the context of the non-diegetic game names. Obviously since this whole site describes a fictional universe, it would be impractical to follow Wikipedia's standard of qualifying everything as being fictional.

• Point of View:
  • In-universe
  • Out-of-universe
• Tense:
  • Perpetual present
  • End of time

It may be best to pick different combinations of these in different contexts:

• In-universe descriptions
• In-universe events
• Out-of-universe descriptions
• Out-of-universe events

And even within events, are there different times when different tenses would be appropriate? << Locke^(T·C) >> 08:47, March 26, 2013 (CDT)