Xenharmonic Wiki:Article guidelines
These article guidelines will hopefully make life easier in this wiki, not only for authors but also for readers. Some of them are adopted from Wikipedia, but we will keep it short and trust into good communication. Don't forget to follow the Xenharmonic Wiki: Conventions.
Naming articles
We follow Wikipedia's style guides WP:THE, WP:PLURAL, and WP:NCCAPS. In summary:
Case
The title or lemma should be in English sentence case (e.g. Sentence case) as opposed to title case (e.g. Title Case), in other words, only the first letter is capitalized if there is not an abbreviation or name in it. The reason behind this guideline is that it's much easier to remember how a lemma is spelled and it can be easily embedded into sentences without changing anything. The first letter of a in-wiki link is automatically capitalized, exactly as article names are.
Plurals
The title should also be in singular form unless it is a collection for different types of things. To link to [[interval]] or [[interval]]s is much easier than to link to [[intervals|interval]], because the link text automatically incorporates the letters following closing double brackets.
Articles
We save articles at the initial of the title, unless it is an integral part of the title.
Examples
- Val (correct)
The valVals- Normal lists (correct)
- Online platforms (correct)
Inline styling
Don't try to hard-code the intended visual style in the article namespace by adding lots of <span style="..."> code. The readability will decrease if everybody uses their personal style. It's also hard to edit a page if you don't understand how it is constructed. If you find something that looks really bad try to find the responsible CSS clause for it or ask an organizer or administrator to do so. If bugs in the CSS style get fixed, this will make more than one user happy.
Another way to get a special layout into articles or article sections is to use templates. If the requested template isn't available, ask an experienced user to build one for you.
Heading levels
Within articles, use from H2 (== Title ==) for the highest level down to H6 (====== sub sub sub sub heading ======), but try to avoid too many levels of sub sections. To go down to H4 will often be enough, most articles will only use H2 levels.
Use of escape templates or HTML codes
Certain characters and character sequences have special meanings in Wiki markup, and sometimes need to be escaped using escape templates or HTML codes. However, this should generally be done only as a last resort since they often make the wiki text difficult to read and edit.
Avoid (generally)
{{((}}Example template|argument{{))}}
Preferred
<nowiki>{{Example template|argument}}</nowiki>
Whitespaces (except for the ordinary space) are encouraged to be written in HTML codes because it is otherwise hard to know what they are. If HTML codes are used, names are preferred to Unicode code points, and if code points have to be used, hexadecimal (base-16) is preferred to decimal (e.g.   is preferred over  ) because code points are usually shown in hexadecimal.