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.
Contents
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.
It is possible to link words that are not exactly the same as the linked article title, [[English language|English]] for example. Make sure, however, that it is still clear what the link refers to without having to follow the link. When forming plurals, do so thus: [[language]]s. This is clearer to read in wiki form than [[language|languages]] — and easier to type. This syntax is also applicable to adjective constructs, e.g. [[Asia]]n, as well as hyphenated phrases and the like.
Try to link accurately. If an article you want to link doesn't yet exist, do a quick search to find out if that is really the case; the article may have a slightly different name than you expect.
Never use "click here" as the text for a link (since Wikipedia articles could be printed) — this conveys no information at all. The text of the link should be the subject to which the link leads.
External links
Wikipedia is not a link collection and an article with only links is actively discouraged, but it is appropriate to reference more detailed material from the World Wide Web. This is particularly the case when you have used a web site as an important source of information.
Syntax
The syntax for referencing a URL is simple. Just enclose it in single brackets:
[URL optional-text-after-space]
The URL must begin with http:// or another common protocol, such as ftp:// or news://.
In addition, putting URLs in plain text with no markup automatically produces a link, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org. However, this feature may disappear in a future release. Therefore, in cases where you wish to display the URL because it is intrinsically valuable information, it is better to use the short form of the URL (host name) as the optional text: [http://www.nationstates.net/ www.nationstates.net] produces www.nationstates.net.
Link titles
You can add a title to an external link by supplying descriptive text after the URL separated by a space and enclosing it all in square brackets. For example, to add a title to a bare URL such as http://www.nationstates.net (this is rendered as "http://www.nationstates.net"), use the following syntax: [http://www.nationstates.net a political simulation game] (this is rendered as "a political simulation game").
Some URLs are ugly and uninformative; in such cases, it is better for a meaningful title to be displayed rather than the URL itself. For example, "European Space Agency website" is much more reader-friendly than "http://www.esa.int/export/esaCP/index.html".
If the URL is displayed, make it as simple as possible whilst still leading to the desired page; for example, remove the superfluous index.html.
The "printable version" of a page displays all URLs in full, including those given a title, so no information is lost.
URLs as footnotes
Without the optional text, an external reference appears as a footnote: For example,
- [http://www.nationstates.net/]
is displayed like this:
