Information Rating System Wiki:Style Guide

This style guide is intended to help us align on style and best practices while building our wiki. It is a living document; if we don't like something, we can change it or make an exception. Let's talk about it.

Article titles

Article titles should be non-plural nouns if possible. Plurals are acceptable if the article is an inseparable collection or list. Prefer true nouns over gerunds.

• Discouraged: Communities
  • Encouraged: Community
• Discouraged: How to introduce members to the community
  • Encouraged: Methods for community member introduction
• Discouraged: Constructing predicates
  • Encouraged: Predicate construction

Titles for articles on named concepts should, if possible, reflect the name we use for that concept, expressed in the singular form. For example:

• Discouraged: Aggregation services
  • Encouraged: Aggregator
• Discouraged: AI-driven actor
  • Encouraged: Simulacrum

Article composition

Start each article with a short (2-4 sentence) definition and/or description of the article title. The first sentence should re-state the title in bold and lowercase (unless it is a proper noun). See the following example:

Article Title: Simulacrum > A simulacrum is an AI agent which is capable of credibly emulating a human user of a system. Simulacra with varying degrees of > effectiveness do exist in the real world, but the concept is also useful in thought experiments about decentralised systems.

Link to named concepts and other articles as you go along, regardless of whether those articles actually exist yet. If you link to another article which does not exist, add creating that article to the bottom of your "articles-to-create list"; that is, linking to a non-existing article implies that you intend to create it soon, or at least delegate that creation to someone else.

Only link the first occurrence of a word in each large section. This is a loosely-defined guideline on purpose. Use your best judgement. You don't want to turn the entire page blue/purple with links on each and every instance of the same word. A good idea might be to limit linkifying a word to the first instance on the page and the first instance of each section which is likely to be linked into from outside the article.

Article creation

• Search the wiki before creating an article.
  • Avoid creating duplicate articles or sections. If an existing article overlaps with yours, figure out how to resolve this elegantly:
    • If another article(s) has a section which is a subset of your article, see if it makes sense to edit in a link to your article and move any general explanations of your article's subject to the new article. The Main template might be useful here.
    • If an article (or section of an article) on your subject already exists, see if it makes more sense to move that article/section to the new name, or create a redirect to the existing article, perhaps to a particular new or existing section.
• Do not create orphaned articles. Orphaned articles are those articles which are not linked from any other article on the wiki.
• After you create an article, search for mentions of the concept in other articles and retrofit them with links to your article.

Bias

Avoid showing political bias. This may be difficult and boring, but disinformation is our #1 enemy, and fighting it requires all of humanity to unite against it. Avoid callouts, controversial examples, "inside" jokes, clever crypticisms and other divisive behaviour. If it makes you chuckle to yourself or gives you a head rush as you type it, it's probably best left out, especially if you really want to leave it in.

Other

In general, refer to the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style for a lot of good advice about how to construct and format a wiki, though not all of it will be applicable since Wikipedia is a general-purpose encyclopedia and this wiki is not.