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. Note that there are no spaces either before or after the colon character. 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.
If a sentence has multiple footnotes, the footnotes should be separated with super-scripted commas as follows:
...end of sentence.[5][^,^][6]
and would be formatted as follows:
And the end of the article, in the footnote section, there needs to be a blank line between each footnote (the “fn” piece).
Images, Graphics and Equations
If needed by the article, a graphics image (whether a chart, equation, etc.) can be used by first uploading it to the wiki images area using the “File Upload” menu option. The system guides you through the process, and ends by displaying the appropriate way to reference the image in the article. When using images, please be sure to save the file using the smallest size reasonable.
Article Discussions
Because the society site has forums built-in, any discussions of article content should be done using the article forum. If an article does not have a discussion ongoing, there will be a menu tab that says “start a discussion”, and if there is a discussion already started, it will say “discuss article”.
