Project:Style guide
This page documents an Online Communipedia policy. It describes facets of project governance or standards that all editors need to follow. |
When editors are contributing to this project they should follow the guidelines provided below so that articles have a consistent style and feel.
General conventions
Section titles
Section titles should follow sentence case (See also) and not title case (See Also). Note that proper nouns should still be capitalized (Rise of the Bluefaced Eagles in gaming).
American spelling
All pages should have American spelling.
Point of view
All pages in mainspace should be in third person (they, he, she, their) and not first person (I, me, myself, you). The point of view in the Project:
namespace may switch between either point of view but must remain consistent on the page.
Capitalization
Capitalization should only occur if:
- Punctuation demands it.
- The word is a proper noun.
- The word is an acronym.
- A page is being spoken of from the perspective of it being a page, in which case the capitalization should match that of the page name.
Common incorrect uses include:
- Capitalization of
The
without it being attached to the proper noun. in The United Kingdom is incorrect; in the United Kingdom is correct. - Common abbreviations. Etc., E.g, I.e is incorrect; etc., e.g, i.e is correct.
Dates
Dates should only be in 2 formats:
January 5, 2001
(January 5th, 2000 is incorrect, theth
should be omitted)01/05/2001
(2000/05/01, 05/01/2000, and 01/05/01 are all incorrect; it shouldMM/DD/YYYY
)
The 1st format should be preferred to the 2nd; the 2nd should only be used when space must be reduced.
etc v. etcetera
The abbreviation for etcetera should be used over spelling it out. Sally got apples, oranges, etcetera is incorrect; Sally got apples, oranges, etc. is correct.
Wikilink frequency
Generally speaking, a page should only be linked too once per article. This is not a hard rule and may be bent selectively for the reader's benefit.
Wikipedia linking
Generally, this should be reserved to linking to the internal pages of Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, or MediaWiki to assist editors with editing this project. This is not a hard rule and may be bent selectively for the reader's benefit.
Numbers
Just use the number, do not write it out. Five is incorrect; 5 is correct.
Italicization of game names
When referring to video games always italicize them. Among Us is incorrect; Among Us is correct.