NSWiki:Style guide

This Manual of Style has the simple purpose of making things look alike — it is a style guide. The following rules don't claim to be the last word. One way is often as good as another, but if everyone does it the same way, NSwiki will be easier to read and use, not to mention easier to write and edit. In this regard the following quote from The Chicago Manual of Style deserves notice:

Rules and regulations such as these, in the nature of the case, cannot be endowed with the fixity of rock-ribbed law. They are meant for the average case, and must be applied with a certain degree of elasticity.

Clear, informative and unbiased writing is always more important than presentation and formatting. Writers are not required to follow all or any of these rules: the joy of wiki editing is that perfection is not required. Copy-editing wikipedians will refer to this manual when weeding, and pages will either gradually be made to conform with this guide or this guide will itself be changed to the same effect.

Please see NSwiki:Page editing for information on how to use all the different forms of markup — there is much more available than just bold or italic. This article concentrates on when to use them, although the examples usually also show the markup.

Article names

It is customary for the title to be the subject of the first sentence of the article. Make article titles bold in the first sentence using '''three apostrophes''' — do not self-link to embolden the title. Avoid putting links inside the emboldened title. Use '''''bold italics''''' in the first sentence only for terms that would be italicised even if they were not set in bold, for example, book titles.

Links

Free links

The use of so-called "free links" to other topics, for example, [[NationStates]], is encouraged. Use the links for all words and terms that are relevant to your article.

Don't make too many links. For each link that you add, ensure that there is a reasonable amount of unlinked text to make the article easy to read. It is difficult to know how many links are appropriate for any particular article. A suggestion is that if 10% of the words are already linked, then perhaps some less vital link can be removed when more important links are added. Do not link every occurrence of a word; simply linking the first time the word appears will usually be enough. For words that appear first in an article and then in a list farther down, it can be linked again in the list.

Don't link words in article titles; find alternative ways to include and then link those words.