Manual of style

This is the Manual of style for the Cause Prioritization wiki. Feel free to reference this page when you have questions about the editing style. However, we also like to Be Bold, so don’t worry too much about style if it makes you anxious.

Discuss the manual of style on the corresponding discussion page.

General rule

In general, it’s best to follow Wikipedia’s Manual of Style, which is fairly comprehensive. The exceptions that follow are mostly due to this wiki using markdown and not MediaWiki for its source files.

Exceptions

Here are some general points that diverge from Wikipedia’s Manual of Style.

  • For links, use [text](url) instead of defining markers like [text][marker] and then having [marker]: url. This makes it easier to copy-paste parts of pages into other pages.
  • Keywords for a page should include the phrases that someone looking for the topic would likely use to locate the page. In practice, these are best discovered “naturally” as one tries and fails to locate a page, then adds the keywords that one initially used (but didn’t lead to the page).

    As for style, just use an HTML comment at the top of the page, right below the header, like this:

    <!-- keywords
    keyword1 keyword2 keyword3
    -->
  • Although gitit can handle several different markup languages for the document source, use markdown. One exception is a page that mostly contains a table (example)—the preferred markup language here is MediaWiki; just set format: mediawiki in the YAML header.
  • For referencing an external source, either document the citation in a footnote, or link to the source.