Formatting Guidelines

From AIUK Wiki

Please note that the formatting guide is a work in progress. See Help:Formatting for technical information on how to format your article.

Organising your article

Break your article into relevant sections using 'headline text' as headings (eg. ==Heading 1==) and sub-headings (eg. ===Heading 1.1===). If the subject of your article has been discussed many times on AIUK it would be worthwhile to include a section of links to relevant threads on the forums. Likewise, links to relvant external websites should be placed in a section at the end of the article.

At the moment the formatting guidelines on the wiki are minimal. For an idea of how to format a fairly long article please take a look at Cartel Triple Arrow, which was the pilot article for the project. As the wiki grows, these guidelines will be adapted to reflect feedback from users. To discuss these guidelines click on the discussion tab above or click here.

Using templates

Some basic templates have been set up so that they can be used to flag any issues with articles. The three most useful templates are Template:Stub, Template:Cleanup and Template:Rewrite.

If you start an article but only feel able to add a small amount of information please add the Stub Template to the top of the article. This can be done by including {{Stub}} in your article. Likewise, if you feel that an article needs its formatting cleaned up you should include {{Cleanup}}, or if you feel an article needs to be re-written add {{Rewrite}}.

By adding a template to an article it will do two things. The first is that a block of standard text will be added to the article. For example, in the case of the stub template the text explains that the article has minimal information. The second effect of using a template is that it will automatically add the article to a category that matches the template. So, an article that uses the stub template will be automatically added to the stubs category

Referencing

Where possible all information that is presented on the wiki should be referenced. This can be done by adding hyperlinks to the source matrial, or a reference to where it appears in a printed form. A referencing system has recently been installed on the wiki that will enable Wikipedia style footnotes to be added to articles. For more information on how to use it please look at this external webpage: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cite/Cite.php. An AIUK wiki help page about the referencing system will be written soon.

Feel free to break the rules (within reason)

If you think the formatting on the wiki is rubbish feel free to format your article in a better way. If you do so please bring it to everybody's attention on the forum. If the Wiki Supervisors like what you've done they might even change the wiki formatting guidelines to take onboard your changes. However, if they don't like it, be prepared to have your article torn apart and reformatted.

The Sandbox

The sandbox is an article that only exisits so that you can play with it. Use this page to test how formatting works. Don't worry about any changes you make - the page will be rolled back to its original version when we remember to do it.