Folgerpedia:Manual of Style

In general, follow Wikipedia's Manual of Style when creating articles. Be advised that this article is a work in progress and should be consulted often.

Article titles, headings, and sections

When deciding on a name for an article, follow the general Wikipedia principles. Key points include:

  • A title should be recognizable (as a name or description of the topic), natural, sufficiently precise, concise, and consistent with the titles of related articles.
  • Use sentence case for article titles and headings, not title case (unless the heading is, itself, the title of something, e.g. "Manual of Style", or begins with a word that always starts lower-case, e.g., "eBay", etc.).
  • Omit initial articles (e.g., "Playbill collection", not "The playbill collection"), unless by convention it is an inseparable part of a name (e.g., The Hague) or it is part of the title of a work (e.g., The Beauties of Shakespeare).
  • Titles should normally be nouns or noun phrases: "Shakespeare's era", not "In Shakespeare's era". Using phrases beginning "In..." is okay for section headings, though.
  • Omit punctuation characters that have special meaning in MediaWiki syntax (e.g. colon, square brackets, curly brackets). They might look okay, but the will not be properly indexed for searching and sorting.
  • Begin each article with a sentence or two summarizing the topic (the "Lead section")
  • Use level 2 headings or lower for subsections within the article (having four or more level 2 headings automatically creates a table of contents)

Content

  • Please be sure to submit content you have written or have taken from the public domain or a similar free resource. If your content does not fit these parameters, please cite your sources using the <ref> extension. Please do not submit copyrighted work without permission or citation of sources.
  • All submitted content is subject to Folgerpedia's content license.
  • Do not sign articles with a signature and timestamp. This convention is reserved for talk pages only.

Linking

  • When including links to other articles or websites, only link the first occurrence of that topic in your article.
  • Use internal links for content within the Folger's wiki space (i.e., in Bard2, Folgerpedia, or the Insites wiki farm) so that the globe icon doesn't display.
  • Try to hide URL behind text so URL does not display, allowing for a cleaner looking article.

Categories

When utilizing categories, please be sure to include as much of the category tree as applies. Feel free to look under Special Pages, Category list, to find the relevant section of the tree, as well as any pertinent orphan categories that might fit your article. If you do not feel comfortable categorizing your article, Folgerpedia staff will do so for you. Feel free to propose any categories you believe fit your article.

Redirects

  • Redirects, like article titles, should be concise and precise. For collection item articles, please create redirects for the item call number.
  • For articles with diacritics in the title, provide a redirect without diacritics.
  • For articles with a dash ("–") in the title, provide a redirect with a hyphen ("-").
  • Create redirects to other alternative titles as needed (e.g., the call number for an article about a named item in the collection).
  • Keep in mind that redirects are for alternative forms of titles, not for keywords or "shortcuts."

Citation

  • When using the References extension, please cite your sources using the most recent version of Chicago style notes and bibliography.
  • To cite Folgerpedia, please first consult the article Citing Folgerpedia.

Specialized styles

For help creating certain types of articles, read the List of Folgerpedia templates article.

See Category:Template for a full list of pages with in the "Template" category.