Doom Wiki:RFC/Style guideline proposal

From DoomWiki.org

< Doom Wiki:RFC
Revision as of 12:08, 19 July 2015 by Quasar (talk | contribs) (Discussion)

Edit-paste.svg

Request For Comment
This is an active request for comment on a particular article issue or project. Active RFCs are automatically logged at Doom Wiki:RFC and can be found in Category:Active RFCs.

I would like us to have a simple list of common style issues, apart from Doom Wiki:Policies and guidelines or Doom Wiki:FAQ, in which some of the information is deeply buried under a mountain of text that nobody will more than likely ever read.

Some propositions

  • Usage of Template:Wp needs to be documented as preferred over bare use of the wikipedia: interwiki. This can, in certain articles, save entire kilobytes of wiki text as well as a significant amount of RSI pain to users like myself (I would also like to note that being forced to constantly correct this causes similar pain).
  • Usage of Template:C needs to be documented as mandatory versus usage of <code> or <tt> in contexts other than extended multiline blocks of code.
  • Titles of games that are not primary subject matter should always be italicized. This is already stated, and similarly buried in the above mentioned documents.
  • Inline simple quotations should generally not be italicized except where it is called for, for some specific stylistic issue.
  • Capitalization standards need to be reiterated. We do not capitalize links to normal articles (ie., one does not discuss the topic of Wikis).
  • Punctuation around quotations should follow American English standards (since that's what we do with everything else so far). Periods and commas go inside the closing quote, even if not part of the original quotation. Question marks and exclamation points are the opposite.
  • Usage of inline hyperlinks as citations (like this [1]) is obsolete. Usage of Extension:Cite should be mandatory.
  • Citations should prefer an MLA, APA, or similar standards body's format. Author, title, publication, date of publication, date of access, and if available or applicable, page number(s) should be given for literary sources. Bare naked hyperlinks are not suitable citations due to the habit of things to link rot.
  • Basic use of wiki links needs to be outlined in simple terms:
    • Standard plurals can be formed by appending the pluralization outside the wiki link; there is no need to repeat the entire link text. Most newbie editors get this wrong.
    • There is never any need for underscores in wiki links, not even interwiki links. They should be avoided.

Discussion

Feel free to comment or suggest changes/additions here.

What will be the stance on <source>. I read some arguments against it but I can barely remember them now. It definitely needs some CSS but it is much better than this. --Kyano (talk) 10:30, 19 July 2015 (CDT)


I'd amend the bit about plural to be about regular plurals. [[mancubus]]i, since we're going with this, isn't going to work better than [[mancubus|mancubi]]. I'd also amend that underscores instead of spaces are never needed in wiki links, because there are things which use underscores as part of the name (codepointer names, source file names, some nicknames, etc.). Finally, I personally hate putting closing punctuation inside of a quote when it does not belong to it. --Gez (talk) 11:53, 19 July 2015 (CDT)

So which style are we to follow then? Whichever the current editor prefers? Seems haphazard but I'm not going to put a big argument forward either since it's minor. I tend to "correct" things to the American style while editing articles however. --Quasar (talk) 12:08, 19 July 2015 (CDT)