LPedia:Manual of Style
This is presently an incomplete proposal mainly based on actual practice.
Article and Link Titles
- All titles should be in title case, not sentence case: New York Election Results, not New York election results.
Titles that are names of persons should be in the form of personal name and last name -- Walter Block instead of Walter Edward Block except in situations where there is a name collision this way (Gary Johnson and Gary Johnson) or if that is not the way this person's name is handled in normal day-to-day interactions. Redirects with middle names and initials should be created. Initials have been presented without periods at the end -- Percy L Greaves, not Percy L. Greaves
The fully presented name with all names and titles, unabbreviated if the full names are known, should be in bold in the opening sentence or at least paragraph. ie: Walter Edward Block, PhD and Percy L Greaves, Jr
Among the reasons for simplified names is to reduce the changes of stray red links when the person has an article, and to reduce bot confusion when mining the wiki for data.
Headers
- All headers should be in title case, not sentence case: External Links, not External links.
File Names
Photographs
Photographs typically relate to one or more of: people, locations, organizations, activities, and dates. In addition, elements of a set of related photographs are commonly identified using sequence numbers, assigned either automatically by the camera or after the fact by an editor. In general, both to help other users understand to what a photo relates and to minimize name collisions, file names should include multiple components reflecting different aspects of the subject matter, e.g., person and activity, or person and location.
- In most cases including at least three components will be helpful.
- Single-component file names will almost never be appropriate.
- It will almost always be appropriate to include something about the date -- at least the year.
- Multiple photos from the same event may include some sort of sequence number if there is no other obvious way to distinguish among them.
Examples of appropriate file names:
- Ohio-convention-1988-keynote.jpg
- JohnSmith-mayor-1998.jpg
- LNC-meeting-2010-03-12-DSC03267.jpg
- fairbooth-Springfield-MA-1982.jpg
- 2003-Connecticut-convention-2.jpg
Examples of file names that are NOT appropriate:
- 12.jpg
- 20161203.jpg
- DSC02245.jpg
- John-Smith.jpg (when? where? doing what?)
- fairbooth.jpg (when? where?)
- convention-2012.jpg (where?)
- California-convention.jpg (when?)
Other Image Files
Other image files containing graphics such as logos and maps should similarly be distinguished from each other through the use of multi-component names. Again, including at least a partial date will usually be helpful.
Other Files
Files containing formal documents, scanned newsletters, and so on should have multi-component names reflecting the nature of the particular material, with a standard naming convention chosen to allow coverage of both existing and future material of the same type.
For most formal documents, this will include at least the type of document and some form of date. For example, for meeting minutes it will need to include at least some sort of name/abbreviation of the committee/body that was meeting and the date of the meeting, as well as the actual word "minutes" (because the same committee/body might well have other associated documents, also identified by date).
For periodicals, in some cases it may be appropriate to use a volume/issue number convention rather than a date. However, this is best limited to cases where the original periodical used a consistent numbering system throughout its existence. There are some periodicals which, although they maintained a similar purpose and similar name over many decades, switched how they numbered volumes, perhaps when a new editor took over. In such cases it probably makes sense to use issue date (in most cases year and month) as the primary identifier, even if it was also labeled with volume/issue numbers.
Needed conventions
Standard Sections for State Party Articles
What are they and what are they named? Not only could this improve consistency, it would also make it easier to set up maintenance bots.
Which tags should go where by default?
Presentation of Lists of Historical Activists
A standardized presentation of names, positions, and years could make it practical to mine the state, county, and similar pages for peopel and information to generate article stubs.