Editor Guidelines

• Be considerate, especially when correcting a mistake another editor has made. Do not be rude or offensive. This applies to everything on this site, including comments and edit summary text.
  • Do not use sarcasm or other deceitful style of speech.
• Do not delete other people’s contributions thoughtlessly. Try to understand why such an edit has occurred; consider whether it could be useful.
• Do not quickly edit after someone else’s edit. Leave some time before editing.
• No marketing speech. Write from a neutral point of view.
• Structure your text carefully.

Important: Multiple edits made by the same editor within half an hour of each other no longer count as just one edit in Recent Changes. The half hour is now reduced to one minute.

• As of now, all non-minor edits are reported immediately to IRC. If you are testing functionality or are just an obsessive editor, either use the preview button, or check minor edit so your edits do not disturb IRC. After you are sure that you are done, you can make a dummy edit and save without checking the minor edit box, if you make a significant change. This includes the Sand Box.
• Please don't do mass changes (a small change that is done to 10 pages at the same time), unless you have discussed their need with other editors. Each edit creates a new copy of the page in database, and the site administration prefers quality over quantity. If you edit a page, please do more than just adding a comma, although adding just a comma is not forbidden as long as it doesn't become a mass change.

• Write in a way that is easy to understand and avoid local slang or phrases. Many of those who will read your text may not have English as their first language.
• Avoid the “click here” phrase. Do not say: “More info about this game can be found here” but use “More info about this game can be found at the Umihara Kawase page”.
• Use active words. Avoid using passive words like “get” and “have”.
• A conscientious writer spends time to reduce the readers’ efforts instead of avoiding writer’s work.
  • Exercise good spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
    • Check your apostrophes. Avoid using the apostrophe as a contraction (e.g. shortening “is” into “’s”.)
    • Do not use lazy shortcuts such as “y” for “why” or “2” for “to”. See below on acronyms.
  • Avoid using symbolic shortcuts, such as “&” for “and”, “/” for “or”.
    • If you use “&”, put space before and after the “&”.
  • Avoid acronyms unless they are well-established in their context (e.g. TAS and FCEU are all right, IMHO is not).
    • Pseudo-acronyms (e.g. recursive acronyms, words that look like acronyms, words with backronyms) are an exception.
    • A good acronym should represent something concrete, not a personal emotion or opinion or something that seems to be a lazy shortcut.
    • Do not use chat acronyms (i.e. “IMHO”, “BTW”). They are nothing more than lazy shortcuts.
    • It may help to describe what an acronym stands for if you use one.
  • It is recommended to capitalize every letter of an acronym to avoid confusion.
  • Extremely careful writers will check how well their text maintains its meaning in machine translations. As an example, avoid using the word “get”. It is too vague and might not translate correctly.

• You are free to contribute anonymously, but if you represent yourself (“I think...”), you should prefix your comment with a link to your homepage (“Bisqwit: I think...”) or suffix it (“I think ... --Bisqwit”).
• It is preferable to write neutrally, without a bias and without a personal reference.
  • Avoid using emotional or loaded language.
• The purpose of the edit summary is to provide a summary for your edit. Do not use the edit summary as a discussion vehicle. If you must discuss something, do it in the page or on the discussion forum.

• Do not squeeze all your text together. Fear not to separate paragraphs with an empty line. Avoid the line-breaker (%%%).
  The bad extremes to avoid are:
  • A long blob of text.
  • A page consisting entirely of short single lines. Such form lacks a skeleton. It just looks like a collection of separate thoughts.
• Divide your text into paragraphs for easy reading, and write headings and subheadings. Maintain a proper structure.
• Do not overuse any features of the wiki. This includes headings and emphasis.
  • Do not overuse the list marker (*), like is being done on this page ;-)
• In the page source code, try to keep your lines shorter than 70-80 characters (in order to make the diffs readable), if possible. The wiki will take care of line joining and wrapping, so do not worry about it.
  • If you use a text editor and it supports word wrap, do not use it except for viewing and editing lists with long lines, in which case turn it off afterward.
• Know your emphasis. Use monospace for codes (command lines, passwords, ..), italics for quotes and emphasis (emphasize only one word) and bold for very important items.
  • Avoid using all capital letters as a means of emphasis. We have bold and italics for a reason. If you feel you have to, consider whether you are overusing bold or italics.
  • Do not use “quotation marks”, *asterisks* or other non-alphanumeric characters as a means of emphasis. Use quotation marks only for quotes and literal wordings.
  • Do not use multiple or mixed exclamation marks (!) and/or question marks (?) in a row for emphasis. Use one only.
  • Do not use “leet” or leet slang or any other word-obfuscating language for the sake of emphasis.
• Do not use preformatted text (space in beginning of line) unless you are writing computer code or such stuff that requires proper indentation.
• Learn the text formatting rules.

Step by step guide:

1. Think of the purpose of this site. Does your planned page serve the audience of the site?
2. Think of a name for your page. The name should contain the essence of the page’s topic. For example, a page of tips and tricks for Rygar would be “Rygar tricks”.
   • The name should be as short as possible (for easy remembering and easy linking), but not shorter. Do not use acronyms (see above).
   • If there is danger of confusion (there are multiple different games by the same name, but you are writing only about one of them, for example), add more words to the name.
3. Edit an existing page and add a link to that new page. (Note: Do not make it an absolute link, i.e. you must not include the host name in it. The Text formatting rules explains how to create links.)
   • The name’s respective address subname consists of JoinedCapitalizedWords. For example, if you want to create a page called “text formatting rules”, its address subname will be TextFormattingRules. The actual http address is “http://tasvideos.org/” followed by the subname and “.html” (e.g. “http://tasvideos.org/TextFormattingRules.html”).
4. Then click the newly created link, which will take you to the page you wanted to create.
   • It is possible to create a page directly from its address; however do not forget about the page lest it become a Wiki orphan.
5. Click the Edit link on that page.

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See also:

• Text formatting Rules
• User pages (aka. homepages)

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EditorGuidelines last edited by FractalFusion on 2008-02-02 10:42:21
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