From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Toolbox

Stolen from User:Tawker --

Toolbox used from User:FireFox


Style stuff

Stylistically, I lean toward AP and Strunk & White: simple, direct, precise, everyday English aimed at regular people.

  • Use "because" instead of "due to."
  • Use "9 a.m." instead of "9 o'clock in the morning."
  • Use "and so on" instead of "etc."
  • Brevity! Use smaller words for bigger words that mean the same thing.
  • Put "only" in the correct place in a sentence. ("...only use the sandbox for editing experiments" should be "use only the sandbox for editing experiments." Really.
  • Spell "judgment" correctly

Selected guidelines

"Wordiness has no place in Wikipedia." Amen.

Rather than list articles for deletion, make liberal use of the following and other tags to draw attention to articles that are good subjects, but need some help being developed:

{{attention}}
{{stub}}
{{cleanup}}
{{expand}}
{{peer review}}
{{NPOV}}
{{unencyclopedic}}

Useful guidelines

Criteria for speedy deletion

Dash guidelines for Wikipedia editors

In the interests of Wikipedia:Wikilove and pending a proposed update of the Wikimedia software that will automatically convert strings of hyphens into the appropriate correct en- and em dashes, editors are encouraged to be accepting of others' dash preferences and not to modify a chosen style arbitrarily in the same way as they would refrain from arbitrarily changing "artefact" to "artifact" (or vice versa). The following five dash styles are currently in use on Wikipedia. Of these, three formats are endorsed and two are deprecated. Please do not change them to reflect your preference, except as indicated below.

Tight (unspaced) em dashes—like this. Entered by means of — or you can type it in directly if your keyboard allows it. Spaced em dashes — like this. A very rare subset of this style separates the dash from the surrounding words using hair spaces; since many browsers cannot display hair spaces, these appear on the display as simple tight em dashes.

An additional touch used by some editors is to include a nonbreaking space before the dash — with  — — to keep dashes from appearing at the start of a line.

Spaced en dashes – like this. Entered by means of – or you can type it in directly if your keyboard allows it. (Note: an unspaced en dash may be used to indicate a range of numbers, but unspaced en dashes should not be used for the parenthetical use under discussion in this Guideline.) (The  – line-break trick is used here, too.)

A pair of hyphens -- either spaced or unspaced--like that. These are easier to read in the source text and simple to type, but regarded ugly by some. They may be taken care of in the future by an automatic conversion feature. Under a future version of the software, either they or strings of three hyphens may become the default style.

Editors who do not want the bother of keying in HTML entities or prefer to maintain the readability of the wikitext are free to type their dashes in this fashion. However, subsequent editors are free to convert any double-hyphens they come across to any of the first three types described above, depending on:

Personal preference between en dashes and em dashes, and How the hyphens were initially entered. That is, a spaced double hyphen may only be converted into a spaced em dash or a spaced en dash. The original editor's spacing preference is respected.

A single spaced hyphen - like this. This is considered an en-dash rendered in the same "typewriter" style as the double-hypen for em-dashes, above.

Editors changes should be aware that MediaWiki may be set to automatically convert "--" (two hyphens) in the source to a real dash in the future, all HTML entities such as – will be deprecated and changed back to hyphens in the wikitext. This feature has been suggested many times, and was once implemented, but was backed out due to match conflicts with table markup.

Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_%28dashes%29"


Customizing styles

See the help at [1]

Markup

What it looks like What you type

Emphasized text
Strong emphasis
Even stronger emphasis

''Emphasized text''
'''Strong emphasis'''
'''''Even stronger emphasis'''''

A typewriter font for monospace text or for computer code: int main()

  • For semantic reasons, using <code> where applicable is preferable to using <tt>.
A typewriter font for <tt>monospace text</tt>
or for computer code: <code>int main()</code>

You can use small text for captions.

You can use <small>small text</small> for captions.

Better stay away from big text, unless it's within small text.

Better stay away from <big>big text</big>, unless
<small> it's <big>within</big> small</small> text.

You can strike out deleted material and underline new material.

You can also mark deleted material and inserted material using logical markup. For backwards compatibility better combine this potentially ignored new logical with the old physical markup.

  • When editing regular Wikipedia articles, just make your changes and do not mark them up in any special way.
  • When editing your own previous remarks in talk pages, it is sometimes appropriate to mark up deleted or inserted material.
You can <s>strike out deleted material</s>
and <u>underline new material</u>.

You can also mark <del>deleted material</del> and
<ins>inserted material</ins> using logical markup.
For backwards compatibility better combine this
potentially ignored new <del>logical</del> with
the old <s><del>physical</del></s> markup.

Suppressing interpretation of markup:
Link → (''to'') the [[Wikipedia FAQ]]

  • Used to show literal data that would otherwise have special meaning.
  • Escape all wiki markup, including that which looks like HTML tags.
  • Does not escape HTML character references.
  • To escape HTML character references such as &rarr; use &amp;rarr;


<nowiki>Link &rarr; (''to'') 
the [[Wikipedia FAQ]]</nowiki>

Commenting page source:
not shown when viewing page

  • Used to leave comments in a page for future editors.
  • Note that most comments should go on the appropriate Talk page.


<!-- comment here -->

Diacritical marks:
À Á Â Ã Ä Å
Æ Ç È É Ê Ë
Ì Í Î Ï Ñ Ò
Ó Ô Õ Ö Ø Ù
Ú Û Ü ß à á
â ã ä å æ ç
è é ê ë ì í
î ï ñ ò ó ô
œ õ ö ø ù ú
û ü ÿ


&Agrave; &Aacute; &Acirc; &Atilde; &Auml; &Aring; 
&AElig; &Ccedil; &Egrave; &Eacute; &Ecirc; &Euml; 
&Igrave; &Iacute; &Icirc; &Iuml; &Ntilde; &Ograve; 
&Oacute; &Ocirc; &Otilde; &Ouml; &Oslash; &Ugrave; 
&Uacute; &Ucirc; &Uuml; &szlig; &agrave; &aacute; 
&acirc; &atilde; &auml; &aring; &aelig; &ccedil; 
&egrave; &eacute; &ecirc; &euml; &igrave; &iacute;
&icirc; &iuml; &ntilde; &ograve; &oacute; &ocirc; 
&oelig; &otilde; &ouml; &oslash; &ugrave; &uacute; 
&ucirc; &uuml; &yuml;

Punctuation:
¿ ¡ § ¶
† ‡ • – —
‹ › « »
‘ ’ “ ”


&iquest; &iexcl; &sect; &para;
&dagger; &Dagger; &bull; &ndash; &mdash;
&lsaquo; &rsaquo; &laquo; &raquo;
&lsquo; &rsquo; &ldquo; &rdquo;

Commercial symbols:
™ © ® ¢ € ¥
£ ¤


&trade; &copy; &reg; &cent; &euro; &yen; 
&pound; &curren;

Subscripts:
x1 x2 x3 or
x₀ x₁ x₂ x₃ x₄
x₅ x₆ x₇ x₈ x₉

Superscripts:
x1 x2 x3 or
x⁰ x¹ x² x³ x⁴
x⁵ x⁶ x⁷ x⁸ x⁹

  • The latter methods of sub/superscripting cannot be used in the most general context, as they rely on Unicode support which may not be present on all users' machines. For the 1-2-3 superscripts, it is nevertheless preferred when possible (as with units of measurement) because most browsers have an easier time formatting lines with it.