SkepticWiki:Manual of style
From SkepticWiki
There are a number of templates for article style. If you think your article fit into one of the categories below please use them:
[edit] General rules
- Include the article name in the first sentence and bold the name.
- Both British and American English are equally acceptable just keep them consistent within the article.
- link to words that you think it would be good to have an article on even if such an article does not exist. Only do this on the word’s first occurrence.
[edit] epepke's style points
- No text above the first header. That is, no text that ultimately appears above the table of contents. Most pages seem to start with a Definition header.
- Use the title of the entry in the first paragraph, and put it in bold face without quotes.
- Use bold face sparingly. Introduce new key terms in bold face but only once. Also use bold face for Example 1 etc.
- When referring to a technical term as a term rather than the thing it represents, use italics rather than quotation marks. Use quotation marks for anything longer. This is common published book practice.
- Indent quotations longer than one line and do not use quotation marks. This is standard book practice. Standard book practice is also to use italics, but I'm not sure that this is such a good idea, as lengthy italics can be hard to read on some monitors.
- Put one and only one blank line between paragraphs and after headings.
- Indent examples
- There seems to be little difference between the ASCII quotes and smart quotes in the default font, so I think that either is OK.
- Do not use an apostrophe for plurals (i.e. use "1970s" rather than "1970's") with the exception of plurals of single letters (A's, B's, etc.). This is from the Chicago Manual of Style, and it seems good to me.
- Put trailing punctuation marks in the same font as the text they follow. Chicago Manual of Style again.
- Use italics rather than underlining titles of books and other composite works. Use double quotation marks for short stories and papers.
- Use the mdash after quotes to give attribution of quotes.
Examples that look good to me:
- "'Arf,' she said."—Frank Zappa
- Bozo is one of the seven lifestyles of man as described by The Firesign Theatre. The term bozo is an acronym for "Brotherhood of Zips and Others." It is also a pun on the Spanish vosotros. In Spanish, B's and V's are pronounced the same.
