Style Guide
Contents
General Guidelines
Wikipedia
When in doubt, follow the Wikipedia Guidelines. People have spent years trying to perfect these. They work. 'Nuff said.
Common Links
Current
The link current redirects to the current year's page.
Preferences
Use the first link in each of the following groups preferentially:
- Habitat vs. Hab
- 440 Albert vs. Ottawa Tech
- OCESS or Spacesim vs. Sim
Signatures
Sign any comments you might make with four tildes (~~~~).
Common Spelling Errors
Try to avoid these common misspellings (the first word in each pair is correct):
- Planetarium vs. Planatarium
Capitalization
In multi-word titles, the first letter of every word in the title should be capitalized excepting articles and prepositions. Articles or prepositions should be capitalized if they are the first word in the title.
Third Person
All articles are to be written in the third person.
Lists
Do not create lists of current members, for example "Current Simulators", "Current Astros", and "Current MCs" pages. Instead, these should be mentioned on the appropriate Mission article.
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. Do not use eg. 2005-2006 or 2005.
Bolding
Please bold (enclose in triple apostrophes) the title of an article. This rule does not apply to Mission (1992-93 for example) pages, talk pages, etc.
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.
Your signature can be customized (look at mine: The Killer Rabbit aka Nevin). There is a wikipedia article on how to do this (Wikipedia:How to fix your signature), which deals with pointers on how to correct errors; if you know basic HTML, both it and Wiki formatting work in signatures if you turn on the "Raw Signatures" option in your preferences. For example, my signature is set up like this:[[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!
- Blah!
- Blah!
