Difference between revisions of "Style Guide"

Revision as of 13:29, 14 September 2009

This page is likely to never be complete, and is a compilation of wit and (mostly) wisdom surrounding the art of editing a Wiki article. The tips given here are by no means mandatory, but they make life easier for everyone on the Wiki.

This page is hereby exempt from the 3rd person vs. 1st person rule due to the fact that it is the musings of the sysops and, not, in fact, an article per se. Do not question this. Stefanido 14:13, 19 March 2006 (EST)

General Guidelines

Wikipedia

When in doubt, follow the Wikipedia Guidelines. People have spent years trying to perfect these. They work. 'Nuff said.

Signing Things

Even though this is already in the section on Talk Pages, it has been observed to be needed here. Don't sign your comments by typing your username; sign them by typing ~~~~. Do it! You have been warned!

Planetarium

IT'S SPELLED PLANETARIUM, NOT PLANATARIUM. YOU HAVE COLLECTIVELY BEEN WARNED.

Common Errors

This is an area for Sysops, and those who spend a great deal of time trying to organize the Wiki so that all the links are correct to post their pet peeves.

Hab vs. Habitat

If you are posting a link to the habitat page, please make it [[habitat]] and not [[hab]]. I could just make a redirect, but for us to maintain a semblance of professionalism, we need to cut down on the use of colloquial contractions.

I've created a 'Hab' redirect so that people who run a search for 'hab' will find the Habitat. Yes, this will allow users to be lazy and link to [[hab]] but it will also let the non-wiki savvy find the Habitat without searching at great length. -Avacar

440 Albert

If you are posting a link to our current facilities page, make it [[Ottawa Tech]] and not [[440 Albert]] or various other permutations of our current address. I would make a redirect but I do not know how to, and uniformity is good.

I would argue it should be the reverse, as that location is no longer called Ottawa Tech. As for redirects, I can and have already made a few, so just let me know where you need them. - Avacar

Alright. It's all the same to me really. I just wanted to standardize it so that all the links would work [As you can tell, my wiki skills are non-existent] - Foo1

Capitalization

Since computers are stupid, and cannot process capital letters and lower case letters, I recommend that we capitalize the first letter of every word in the title of an article, since the computer treats Mission Control differently from Mission control, which leads to numerous internal links being non-functional, even though we have an article with the same name, bit different capitalization. For some reason this problem only occurs for titles with 2 letters or more. for single letters, mission will work just as well as Mission. Either way, we should capitalize in a proper fashion to keep the English teachers happy.

Hey, welcome aboard. Next time, please sign your post with four tildes ([nowiki]---Herr Doktor Tolkien von Oxford^{Talk Page} 13:29, 14 September 2009 (EDT)[/nowiki]). There's a workaround for this specific problem: redirects. A redirect is a page that automatically forwards you from, say, "Mission control" to "Mission Control". Yeah, there is some level of capitalization. Which instances were particularly annoying? ---Herr Doktor Tolkien von Oxford^{Talk Page} 13:29, 14 September 2009 (EDT)

1st person vs. 3rd person

All articles are to be written in the third person. I don't want to see any "Now, we are become simulators, destroyers of the hab", or "Those of us in mission control have the following duties..."

The reason for this is that this wiki is not a day to day account of current events. This is the BBoS replacement. This is Sim HISTORY, and as such, all articles must not attempt to reflect the whims of the current membership. Please pause and reflect on how to make you articles both factual, and able to survive for at least a year before needing to be edited because you're no longer EEP commander.

This also bans the creation of "Current Simulators", "Current Astros", and "Current MCs" pages. We have the website to do that, and the wiki for HISTORY.

OCESS

This is the Ottawa Carleton Educational Space Simulation. Do not call it "sim" or "the institution". This is to make the wiki seem more professional, as well as to facilitate linking; because only OCESS and Spacesim work whereas Sim does not.

Years

For the wiki, all years are noted in 20~~ - ~~ form. (ex 2005-06). Please use this for all links and references to facilitate linking and make everything look uniform. Links to [[2005-2006]] or [[2005]] will not work, and are annoying to fix.

Bolding

Please bold ( '' ) the title of an article (this should be the first word or a synonym). This rule does not apply to Mission (1992-93 for example) pages, talk pages, etc. -Ben

Talk Pages

Signatures

Talk pages are a prime breeding ground for poor formatting, just as swamps breed disgusting insects. The two main things to make sure of when editing a talk page are to sign everything you write (by typing ~~~~ after your comment, or by clicking the button that looks like a signature, second from the right). Otherwise, you are likely to be ignored, since we don't know who we're talking to.

[[User:TheKillerRabbit|<font color="green">The</font> <font color="#0099CC">Killer</font> <font color="red">Rabbit</font>]] <font size="1">[http://vv.carleton.ca/~nhotson aka Nevin]</font>

It uses a mix of Wiki formatting (for the links) and HTML tags (for the colours and sizes).

Indenting

If you're part of a discussion about something, indent your posts. Do this by adding a certain number of colons before your post; the first person puts no colons, the second person puts one, the third person puts two, and so on ad infinitum. This allows everyone to see who said what.

Example:

Blah

Blah?

Blah!

Blah!

BLAH!

Templates

If you see a page which needs work (merging, expansion) or contains pseudoscience, insert a template. Templates can be found at Category:Templates. Search Wikipedia for Templates for a large pile of information on them.

How To Do Things

How To Make A Redirect

Let Foo be the redirecting article and Bar be the article it redirects to.

1. Create Foo.
2. Edit Foo such that the page's sole content is "#REDIRECT [[Bar]]"
3. Save the page.

All links to Foo will now send the user to Bar instead.