This page is a guide to providing heraldic blazons in a style that is clear and consistent throughout Wikipedia. As with any style guide, there will be exceptions, and this guide does not carry the same weight as policy. This is a guide to the agreed-upon preferences on how to best represent blazons in Wikipedia's articles. Before making changes to it, please make sure they reflect consensus.
Anglo-Norman blazons (i.e. most if not all blazons) should be put in italics.
This defines blazons as non-standard English and treats them like quotations or foreign or technical terms. Single words and phrases of Anglo-Norman blazonry should also be italicized when expressed separately from a blazon, as a foreign or technical term would be. This follows, amongst others, Charles Boutell (1864): "It appears desirable always to print all heraldic blazon in italic".[1] Heraldry has its own vocabulary, word-order and punctuation, and showing it in italics thus indicates to the reader the presence of a quasi-foreign language. Double quote marks may also be suitable instead of italics, as explained at WP:MOS#Words as words.
Short extracts may be put in-line but longer ones should be indented on a new line (similar to quotations).
This is another convention that treats blazons like quotations and makes them more manageable. In particular, extracts longer than two lines should be indented using <blockquote></blockquote>.
Tinctures should not be capitalized unless the first word of a blazon, i.e. the field. Similarly charges should not be capitalized.
While the College of Arms nowadays tends to capitalize tinctures, this is a recent trend, and should be avoided here. (Tinctures are in effect adjectives, which are not capitalised in standard English usage.) Historically, heralds have shown very little consistency in capitalizing tinctures and charges. (It was for example common practice in the 18th century to capitalise all nouns in English literature.) Fox-Davies advocated leaving all tinctures uncapitalized. The convention of capitalizing the tincture or to distinguish it from the conjunction "or" is not correct heraldic usage and should be avoided. A properly expressed blazon should by definition avoid any possibility of misinterpretation. If a blazon can be misinterpreted by a person with competence in heraldry, the blazon's imperfect and requires re-stating.
Exceptions may exist, such as German heraldry, where charges have been consistently capitalized throughout history. Exceptions may also be made for blazons which feature capitalization in the original text and where that original text is expressly quoted verbatim.
Tinctures may be repeated (e.g. "Or, on a bend gules a sword or") or truncated (e.g. "Or, on a bend gules a sword of the first"), as it appears in the source.
Brevity and clarity may indicate changing a truncated blazon to repeat its tinctures. Clarity should always be the final guide.
Exceptions may be made to any or all of these guidelines if doing so is more appropriate to a blazon than following the guideline.
English-language sources are preferable to sources in other languages so that readers can easily verify the content of the article. However, sources in other languages are acceptable where an English equivalent is not available. Where editors translate a direct quote, they should quote the relevant portion of the original text in a footnote or in the article. Translations published by reliable sources are preferred over translations made by Wikipedia editors.