Project:Style guide

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, the th should be omitted)
• 01/05/2001 (2000/05/01, 05/01/2000, and 01/05/01 are all incorrect; it should MM/DD/YYYY)

The first 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 (such as linking to Wikipedia's article for Company at Systems of governance)

Numbers

Just use the number, do not write it out. Five is incorrect;5 is correct.

Community pages

An article about an online community should generally have the following sections in the following order: