Style of wiki articles
When creating a new wiki article, please following the style guidelines described below. Having a consistent style is very important for readability.
Article Page Name
First and foremost, please choose an article page name fairly carefully, as this will be the system identifier of the article. The page name should be as short as possible without unduly sacrificing specificity. For example, an article on palate cleansing could be named “palate cleansing” if it was a general treatment of the topic, but if it was specific to spicy foods and there was already an article that dealt with, say, lingering sweeteners, you may then want to include “spicy” in the page name.
Also note that when a wiki article refers to another wiki article, it will do so using the page name as the text of the (internal) hyperlink. Hence, an article page name should be something that can be logically and readily used in a sentence.
Assigning a Category
To help organize the wiki, articles are assigned to categories. For example, this article was put under the “help” category. There are also several articles that are under “basic taste.” If the article can be placed within an existing category, it should be. But it may certainly happen that a new category is the first of its kind.
There is a special syntax used to assign an article to a category. The word “Category” and the name of the category must be separated by a colon and enclosed with a set of matching double brackets. So, for example, this article was categorized by using the following as the first line:
[[Category:Help] ]Formatting
Please set the name of the article, which can be longer than the article page name, in larger text using a heading style of “h1”. To do this, simply type “h1” followed by a period, and then a single space before the title text.
Internal references (hyperlinks)
Material already in the wiki should never be copied and pasted into another article, but, instead, it should simply be referenced. To reference another page within the wiki simply enclose the article name within matching double brackets. For example, suppose we wanted to refer back the general, main, help page. In the article, such a reference would look like this: help. When editing, this reference would be entered as follows:
[[help]]External references (hyperlinks)
When an article needs to reference a web page external to the wiki — that is, to provide a standard hyperlink — the syntax for that is somewhat more involved. Suppose that you wanted to reference wikipedia’s article on wiki’s and have the hyperlink formatted as: what is a wiki?. This would be accomplished as follows:
"what is a wiki?":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
Notice that the hyperlink text is first and enclosed in double quotes, followed by a colon, and then finally the full URL.
Footnotes
Whenever possible, if statements are made that are not common knowledge, or a quote is used, a reference needs to be given. In order to avoid hard-to-read, cluttered text, references can be included through the use of footnotes. A footnote can be included by just enclosing its sequential number in matching single brackets. Later, at the end of the article, the footnote text is specified with the “fn” command followed by a number, immediately next to the text.
For example, suppose one made the following quote:
You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to1.
The footnote reference was entered as follows:
... average number will be up to[1].
Later, the actually footnote might look like:
1 Sherlock Holmes in “The Sign of Four,” 1890.
And was entered as follows:
fn1. Sherlock Holmes in “The Sign of Four,” 1890.
Article Discussions
Because the society site has forums built-in, any discussions of article content should be done using the
article forum. Also, if there a discussion thread for an article, there needs to be a hyperlink in the article to the discussion thread. The link should be given at the bottom of the article, and should be titled “Article Discussion.” As an example, the link to the discussion thread on help articles would look as follows:
"Article Discussion":http://www.sensorysociety.org/ssp/forums/viewthread/4/
The number associated with a specific thread can be obtained by inspecting the link to the thread in the forum itself.
