Help:Manual of style

This is the RationalWiki manual of style. It is considered a "soft" guideline.

General writing style

 * Use of the first person is frowned upon, though sometimes it is appropriate. If you do use the words "I" or "me" in an article, please link it to your user name.
 * Likewise, use of the second person singular ("you") can usually be improved upon. Use the indefinite pronoun instead when appropriate.
 * Use appropriate capitalization of deities. If writing about a member of the Christian Trinity, correct style is to capitalize pronouns ("…when on the cross, He was thirsty…"). Likewise, use conventions appropriate to other traditions when referring to them ("His Noodly Appendage"). If referring to general deities, lower case is more appropriate. This is the difference between proper nouns (capitalized) and common nouns (not capitalized). An article that is more humorous than serious in tone might bend these rules quite comfortably. In the same manner, do not capitalize k.d. lang's name, out of respect for her broken shift key.

Consistency

 * Whether an editor follows these guides or prefers their own style, one thing to maintain is consistency throughout an article. Spell words that have multiple English spellings the same way from beginning to end. If one decides to capitalize a word or phrase, do it every time it is used. This makes it so that even if an article is a bit "wrong", at least it doesn't look "stupid".
 * Write in complete sentences. Articles should not open with "Is my favorite Pokémon character." If adding a fact to an article, try to phrase it as a complete sentence, avoiding stubby sentences – such as "He drinks beer".
 * Avoid inside jokes and obscure references in Main space articles. Although RationalWiki is not an encyclopedia, these are confusing to the casual reader.

Spelling, grammar, and abbreviations

 * Do your best to use good grammar and spelling, especially if you write a lot. Slowing down a bit and getting it right makes everyone's life easier. Most modern browsers come with a spellchecker that is a goatsend for this – Safari, Opera, and Firefox have them by default; others are an easy add-on. These can be set to British or American spelling depending on your attitude towards silent letters and "-ize" or "-ise".
 * The spelling wars are best resolved by using a style appropriate to the subject. A topic that is geographically vague should be written in the version that was first used.
 * Avoid abbreviations and shorthand. Use complete words and phrases: "and", not "&". Write out the full name of an acronym the first time it is used in an article: "the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)".

Dates and numbers

 * Dates are clearer if the name of the month is written. "7/12/59" means two different things. 7 December 1959 or July 12, 1959 are precise.
 * Write out short numbers. If a number can be written in two words or less, write it as text. (Exception: mathematical equations.) "Four score" is much more elegant than "80"!

Structure of a RationalWiki article

 * Feature the article title early in the introduction, and bold its first occurrence.
 * Use headers to break up sections of articles. They make articles much easier to navigate and improve upon. Most articles end up with the same three or four final headers. Please use this consistent order:
 * See also (if needed)
 * External links (if needed)
 * Notes (if needed)
 * References
 * Additionally, the "See also" and "External links" sections should be bulleted lists.


 * Please remember to add categories to articles you create. Added categories should be confirmed by text within the article.
 * For living people, it is important to add the category " " to the main page, the template "  " to the talk page and the year of birth when known to the main page using the template "  " (e.g., "  "). The year of birth serves as a disambiguation from similarly named people; the category and template serve as warning to editors not to add potentially libelous material without substantiation in the form of evidence-based references.

Article titles, headers, and categories

 * No unnecessary capital letters in article titles, headers, categories, text, etc., i.e., use sentence case. Some early counter-examples have not been repaired.
 * Use singular where possible in article titles. Categories are often plural because it makes sense (e.g., "dictators").

Quotes
Notes on use:
 * cquote – places a quote between two stylised quotation marks. Suitable for decorative quotes placed at the top of articles.
 * rquote – places a quote between two stylised quotation marks, but is placed off to the side analogous to how the "thumb" attribute on images works.
 * quotebox – places a quote in a coloured box (see the template documentation for details).
 * longquote - for styling long quotes


 * Cquote and rquote both support the source of the material underneath the quote. These should be used wherever possible to cite the quote, even if it is just decorative. A reference tag can be added to the end of this source as normal.
 * Note: Cquote has traditionally been used on the various internet laws where the quote is the exact phrasing of the law or maxim, with bold and italic added.


 * For extensive quotes or ones that form a substantial part of the article text itself (rather than being decorative), quotebox should be used. This doesn't support the source of the quote underneath as it's not needed. Instead, for quotebox quotes introduce it as something along the lines of "this person said" and place a suitable reference tag there. For example:

In defence of his unending idiocy, Joe Q. Clogger said:[1]

The article can continue as normal commenting on the quote.


 * [sic] – from the Latin sic erat scriptum, "thus was it written", is added when the quote seems like it's wrong (e.g. from incorrect spelling or grammar) but that's what the source exactly says. Use of the " [sic] " template is preferred to just using the text ("[sic]").

Linking
Links should be used to encourage readers to traverse the wiki. Links also allow writers to provide background information on subjects without the need to replicate it in every article.


 * Do your best to find good blue links. Using preview and testing slightly different versions will often turn up gold. The "search" function can also be helpful.
 * Link the first time a term is used (unless it's in a header), not every time.
 * Red links are OK if they seem like they would be good RationalWiki articles – this will add them to "wanted pages". Remember that RationalWiki is not an encyclopedia.
 * Be sensible with redirects. Wikipedia some good guidance for dealing with redirects. In short:
 * Redirects can become new articles – and thus a link to that page may be useful.
 * The "piped" links look more confusing in the source code.
 * There can be some exceptions; navigational templates are often best made to bypass redirects.
 * Do not put links in headers. Instead of " ==Barack Obama== " as a header, either put the link in the text following the header or use the " " template directly below the header ("  "), which produces:
 * See the main article on this topic: Barack Obama 
 * A slightly different template (for when another page is relevant but not identical to the section topic) is " ", which produces:
 * For more information, see: Barack Obama 

Linking to Wikipedia
Four methods:


 * 1) ✔ We don't have an article on this, but the reader might like Wikipedia's article:  produces  – an underlined link and a W-logo link, both to the Wikipedia article:
 * 2) ✔ Similar but different:  produces  – an underlined link (or redlink) to the RationalWiki article, followed by a W-logo link to the Wikipedia article.
 * 3) ✔ (For "External links" and "References") Wikipedia has a good page on a related article:  produces •
 * 4) ✘ Don't fucking use this:  produces: Goat – a link to a Wikipedia article that (ugh) looks like a link to a RationalWiki article.

You can also adjust the placement of the Wikipedia logo to the right of punctuation:
 * 1) ✘  produces, which looks rather clunky.
 * 2) ✔  produces  which may flow better. Aesthetically, this also matches the "references should follow punctuation" rule of thumb.

Edit comments and drastic changes

 * Try to write useful edit comments. The person who wrote this is the worst offender, with over 60,000 edits, approximately seven of which are accurately commented.
 * Mass deletion is frowned upon. If you feel the need to remove more than a sentence or two, please copy it to the talk page to discuss your reasons and let other people chime in. Give them a day or two, at least. Silence is not assent.

Images

 * Image thumbnails. Originally the RationalWiki style was that thumbnail images should not specify their width. However, with the now omnipresent "Sidebar navigation templates", it has become necessary to make pages look reasonably formatted. When images appear immediately above or below a sidebar, the image should generally be formatted to 165px to align with the sidebar (e.g., " [[Image:Ann coulter.jpg|thumb|right|165px|Pinocchio, except it's her neck that grows longer]] "). An exception to this is when the image is landscape-formatted and would just look bad at 165px. In general, try to make the images not disrupt the text or make the formatting look bad. Because of the right-aligned sidebars, images should usually appear on the right side.