SeptemWiki:Style Guide

This is the Style Guide for SeptemWiki.

Templates

Templates can make your life a lot easier. Learn about how to use them to the fullest.

Structure

Some types of pages, such as those about the Lands, have a recommended structure: an ordered list of sections.

Headlines

Never use the top level headline. That's what the title of each page formats as. Start with the second level.

= This is a bad top level headline, one equals sign on each side =
== This is a good 2nd level headline, two equals signs on each side ==

Stubs

If you know there's a lot more to say about the topic of your page, mark it as a stub, by putting this near the bottom of the page:

{{stub}}

There are specific stubs for certain fields of interest. To see them all, look at Category:Stub templates.

Note that an article should not be marked as a stub just because it's short. There just isn't a lot to say (particularly in a Septempontian context) about some subjects. Those need not be marked as stubs. A stub is an article, about which topic you know a lot more can and should be said at some point. The point of the stub designation is to help us find such articles and come back to improve them later.

Color Brightness and Contrast

When you're styling boxes with text, you may want to take an existing color and lighten or darken it. Here is a site which makes that easier.

You also should make sure your text and background contrast enough to be legible. Here is a site which lets you analyze the two colors to determine the contrast ratio, and determine whether they Pass or Fail under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) promulgated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Citations

If you're going to include some fact that isn't widely known or easily found on something like Wikipedia, a source would be nice. We don't have to be as fussy about this as Wikipedia does, but it might be nice to help out.
- Example of something easily found elsewhere: How long one of the Tunnels is.
- Example of something not easily found elsewhere: That Quemahoning Tunnel was completed in 1905, or that its west portal was obliterated in 1981 by Turnpike construction crews.
If your source is likely to be something used on multiple pages, make life easier for yourself and everyone else, and add it to the Source: namespace. See Help:Citations for instructions.

Notes or External Links?

Supposing I got a key fact from some other webpage. Should I put that in a Notes or External Links section?

Well, the obvious first answer is "if you're going to use a footnote, then refer to the Notes section."

An External Links section should be thought of as just "See Also" for stuff outside this wiki. If you are answering the question "Wait a second, how do you know that?" it's a Note. If you are telling the reader "Hey, now that you've read this article, if you're interested in learning more, check this other thing out" it's an External Link.

Note example: The Turnpike Commission press releases about the closing of things like Hempfield Service Plaza. We had to refer to that press release to know the date the plaza actually closed, so it's cited as a source for that fact.

External Link example: Adam Prince's page about Ray's Hill Tunnel. This is just general interest, more photographs, etc.

Why not both?

You might cite a specific fact from a specific page on a website, in which case you should make a footnote with that specific page as a reference in the Notes section. But you might also then include that website in External Links because the reader might want to learn more about the topic. That's fine.