Rules and guidelines

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Revision as of 06:20, 4 March 2004 by Skyfaller (talk | contribs) (Initial capitalization does not matter)
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I've done a major cleanup of the front page and the links. A few new rules for editing:

Naming Conventions

In general, try to use Wikipedia's Naming conventions except for cases where we have determined that our naming conventions should be different.

  • Unless the term you wish to create a page for is a proper noun or is otherwise almost always capitalized, do not capitalize second and subsequent words. Initial capitalization does not matter, as the Wiki software always capitalizes the article title's first letter.
  • Categories are shown off by using a "slash" (/) with no spaces.
    • Good: [[Firefox/Profile|Profile]] (when on a page relating to Firefox, just [[/Profile|Profile]])
    • Bad: [[Firefox : Tips : Profile]]
  • When possible, use just a simple article title and remove any existing Categorical structure. Putting a category in the name doesn't really help us find the article. If we do this right, a simple Search should turn up the article, or better yet just hitting "Go" will take you to the precise article you're looking for, because if it has a simple name you don't need to know the Category it is in.
  • When possible, use short page titles. This eases linkability and avoids the current layout bug of long titles overlapping the search box. There's no need for a link to include the entire grammatically complete form of a question, especially when two descriptive words would suffice. Following the example above:
  • Application Name links should only use the App Name, not "Mozilla App Name" except the Suite, which should be linked to and called "Mozilla Suite", not "Mozilla", "Suite", "Seamonkey", or any other name.
  • Layout issues or other things should use Gecko as the App Name. When something affects more than one app in a way that it would be wasteful to split up the articles because they would be practically identical, dispose of the Categories, and just have the plain article title. Only split up the articles by App Category if confusion would result from a united page because the information does not really overlap.

Specificity

  • For the Suite, we have to decide how granular to get, and if we want to futher break things down by component (Browser/Mail and News/Editor/Chatzilla).

Editing Courtesy

  • If you find yourself wanting to change an entry back to an earlier revision, ask yourself if the current version had a useful purpose, and whether it really is necessary to change it back.
  • Document reasons for potentially controversial changes on the Talk pages.
  • Accept changes to your entries in a spirit of helpfulness.
  • We should have a protocol for when someone consistently makes certain types of mistakes or formatting quirks. Place a message in their User page? Email directly?

Test Editing Pages

  • A sandbox for showing off the wiki's features.
  • Another test page - Now with extra markup tests!
  • If you want to do some silly tests using a page use this page.