Help:Style Guide
Use this guide whenever creating or editing content on this wiki.
Contents
Heading and Subheadings
- This is MediaWiki, so the highest subheading level should be H2. (H1 is reserved for the article title.)
- Heading and subheadings should be hierarchical.
Categories
- Make sure every article belongs to at least one category. It is permissible (and in some cases, preferred) for some articles to belong to multiple categories.
- If a header block template exists for a category, be sure to use it on every article in that category. (You can find a list of templates [[1]].
- This is MediaWiki, so categories can (and in many cases, should) be hierarchical.
Capitalization
- Titles of articles, subheadings, etc., should always be in Title Case. That is, capitalize important words.
- For titles of referenced works, use MLA-style capitalization rules. (See this article.)
Links
- Add links generously when they are appropriate.
- Use link labels. Avoid the use of bare URLs. In other words, prefer Google not https://www.google.com.
- Only add an internal link to another article on the first instance in an article, not throughout the entire article.
Copyright
- All contributions you make should be your own writing. Anything copied from another source should be in quotation marks or a blockquote and properly attributed.
- All images should be free of copyright issues and properly credited in a caption.
User Profiles
- Fill out your user profile. Include links to your own website. Add whatever you like.
Talk Pages
- If you have questions about an article, feel free to discuss them on that article's talk page.
- If no talk page exists for an article, feel free to create one.
Marking Pages with Templates
- Feel free to mark pages that need expanding by adding {{Template:Stub}} at the top of the article.
- Feel free to mark orphan pages that need backlins by adding {{Template:Orphan}} at the top of the article.
- If an article is a hot mess, mark it as needed attention by adding {{Template:Needs Attention}} at the top of the article.
Minor Edits
Be sure to mark minor edits as minor edits. What constitutes a minor edit? Generally, anything that does not significantly change the the content of an article is a minor edit.
The following items are minor edits:
- Fixing typos
- Correcting misspellings
- Correcting grammar issues
- Correcting broken links
- Changing the order of sentences in a paragraph.
Anything that changes the content of an article such that the meaning of the article or of a portion of an article is changed is not a minor edit.
The following items are not minor edits:
- Adding or deleting headings
- Adding or deleting paragraphs
- Adding or deleting links
- Changing the order of paragraphs
- Changing the order of sections or subsections.
Add an Edit Summary
An edit summary is a short (under 70 characters, generally) of what edits you have made. A good edit summary is both concise and precise.
Using quotation marks in an edit summary refers to a portion of the article with that title. For example,
Added "Miscellaneous Links"
means that you added a section called "Miscellaneous Links", while
Added miscellaneous links
means that you added various unspecified links to the article.
Both of these edit summaries could be made more precise, however:
Added "Miscellaneous Links" section at end of article <pre> <pre> Added link to ''Rolling Stone'' article
