Help:Suggestions for good style
From TIGHAR
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This is not an official policy page. Please feel free to add your own comments and suggestions about good wiki style. We may reach consensus and make it more official as time goes on.
Contents
General considerations
Wiki style
- Avoid writing articles with no wiki links in them. These are known as "dead ends" and are tracked by the Special page that searches the wiki for Dead end pages.
- Avoid the blue sea of death, in which every other word is a link to somewhere else in the wiki.
Images
- As a general rule, use thumbnails instead of full-sized images.
- Photo galleries are consistent with the thumbnail guideline. Example: Maps of Nikumaroro.
Dates
- We recommend using DAY MONTH YEAR. So, for example "21 August 1952" instead of "August 21, 1952." It seems to be the convention that TIGHAR is using and it accords well with our British sources.
- To avoid confusion, avoid the numeric and slash convention: "xx/xx/xx." 21/8/1952 is easy to decipher, of course, as is 8/21/1952, but 2/4/1948 and 4/2/1948 are confusing. Use "Jan, Feb, Mar ..." or "January, February, March ..." to avoid ambiguity.
- In sortable tables or other such lists, it may make sense to use YEAR-MONTH-DAY (1952-08-21) because alphabetizing such columns or lists places items in chronological order. See the table in the article, Sextant box found on Nikumaroro for an example of such a sortable table.
Naming conventions for ships
- Prefixes have no punctuation. No periods no slashes, i.e. not "M/T", but "MT."
- Only the name is italicized, not the prefix, and if possessive, not the apostrophe or s. Example USCGC Itasca.
- Use the prefix the first time a ship is mentioned in an article, and then use only the name thereafter.
And before renaming the "Itasca" page, I thought I should ask Scott Price what prefix the CG uses for the Itasca (then and now). His reply: "USCGC".
