Style Guide

This page is likely to never be complete, and is a compilation of wit and (mostly) wisdom surrounding the art of editing a Wiki article. The tips given here are by no means mandatory, unless Stefan upgrades Nevin to a full God of editing, but they make life easier for everyone on the Wiki.

General Guidelines

Wikipedia

When in doubt, follow the Wikipedia Guidelines. People have spent years trying to perfect these. They work. 'Nuff said.

Signing Things

Even though this is already in the section on Talk Pages, it has been observed to be needed here. Don't sign your comments by typing your username; sign them by typing ~~~~. Do it! You have been warned!

Common Errors

This is an area for Sysops, and those who spend a great deal of time trying to organise the Wiki so that all the links are correct to post their pet peves.

Hab vs. Habitat

If you are posting a link to the habitat page, please make it [[habitat]] and not [[hab]]. I could just make a redirect, but for us to maintain a semblance of proffessionalism, we need to cut down on the use of coloquial contractions.

I've created a 'Hab' redirect so that people who run a search for 'hab' will find the Habitat. Yes, this will allow users to be lazy and link to [[hab]] but it will also let the non-wiki savy find the Habitat without searching at great length. -Avacar

440 Albert

If you are posting a link to our current facilities page, make it [[Ottawa Tech]] and not [[440 Albert]] or various other permutations of our current address. I would make a redirect but I do not know how to, and uniformity is good.

I would argue it should be the reverse, as that location is no longer called Ottawa Tech. As for redirects, I can and have already made a few, so just let me know where you need them. - Avacar

Alright. It's all the same to me really. I just wanted to standardize it so that all the links would work [As you can tell, my wiki skills are non-existant] - Foo1

Capitalization

Since computers are stupid, and cannot process a capital letters and lower case letters, I recomend that we capitalize the first letter of every word in the title of an article, since the computer treats Mission Control differently from Mission control, which leads to numerous internal links being non-functional, even though we have an article with the same name, bit different capitalization. For some reason this problem only occurs for titles with 2 letters or more. for single letters, mission will work just as well as Mission. Either way, we should capitalize in a proper fashion to keep the english teachers happy

1st person vs. 3rd person

All articles are to be written in the third person. I don't want to see any "Now, we are become simulators, destroyers of the hab", or "Those of us in mission control have the following duties..."

The reason for this is that this wiki is not a day to day account of current events. This is the BBoS replacement. This is Sim HISTORY, and as such, all articles must not attempt to reflect the whims of the current membership. Please pause and reflect on how to make you articles both factual, and able to survive for at least a year before needing to be edited because you're no longer EEP commander.

This also bans the creation of "Current Simulators", "Current Astros", and "Current MCs" pages. We have the website to do that, and the wiki for HISTORY.

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!

Templates

If you see a page which needs work (merging, expansion) or contains pseudoscience, insert a template. Templates can be found at Category:Templates. Search Wikipedia for Templates for a large pile of information on them.