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 that that the person most commonly uses/used, and if there is more than one common form the simpler of them. In most cases this will be a personal name and last name. The personal name will in most cases be the person's actual first name, except when the person consistently used something else, such as a nickname. Middle names should not normally be included, i.e., Walter Block instead of Walter Edward Block, except in situations where there would be a name collision this way (Gary Johnson and Gary Johnson) or if the person is/was normally referred to using a middle name. 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. This is the desired format:
SHORTTITLE_ARTICLENAME_AUTHOR_YEAR-MONTH-DAY_VOLUME-ISSUE-PAGE
SHORTITLE is the common source abbreviation. The ones assigned so far are:
- LPNews (LP News)
- LPledge (Liberty Pledge or Libertarian Pledge)
ARTICLENAME is a shortened form of an article name. An example would be David Nolan's "Case for Libertarian Political Party" which might be listed as CASEFORLIBPARTY.
AUTHOR is the last name of the author.
YEAR-MONTH-DAY is the publication or listed dated which should be in that format (using hyphens).
VOLUME-ISSUE-PAGE is the volume, issue, and page numbers which should be in that format (using hyphens).
Not all documents will have all of these fields. Here are some examples of how this would work. Page 2 of the October 1982 (volume one, issue two) issue of Libertarian Pledge would be: LPledge_1982-10_V1-I2-P2
Elements of items are separated by hyphens and items are separated by underscores. Please message ~~CarynHarlos with any questions.
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.