Wikispooks:Style Guide

The only golden rule of writing is to keep the reader in mind. On the web, this is easier said than done, since the reader could be anybody. Certain principles however should help keep your writing on track. Since this is a wiki, feel free to experiment and try a variety of ways to get your ideas across.

Collaborate

Remember that this is a wiki, so be couteous and be aware that other editors will edit your contributions. Be ready to return the favour by developing articles which others are working on as the mood takes you, dropping in a link to another article or giving some extra piece of information. All of us are smarter than any of us, and it's always encouraging to see your work improved upon by fellow editors. Don't get hung up on matters technical - if you need help with syntax, just ask and someone will pitch in to advise or improve your work. Original ideas and putting information together is more important than presentation.

Avoid Repetition

Repeating material from elsewhere on the web is a fast way to add content, but is off-putting to serious researchers who will recognize it from their earlier research. Repeating chunks of material from one Wikispooks page elsewhere on the site is not only off-putting but also confusing. Instead, think which page the material most logically belongs on and link there from other pages, perhaps using Template:FA.

Wikipedia is a good source, but has its problems, so be selective in how you import from Wikipedia. Linking to material often makes for a more readable article than repeating it, either from elsewhere on Wikispooks or from other websites. When creating internal links, it is generally good practice to link in only the first occurrence of a new word or phrase; it distracts the reader to have a forest of identical links.

Encyclopedic Style

If you're a regular Wikipedia user, you're probably already familiar with encyclopedic style, which applies to all the main: pages (though not the Talk: pages). No use is made of the first or second person ("I" or "You"), content is clearly introduced and structured with well chosen headings and subheadings to help readers quickly locate material of interest, text is written in a flowing style for the sake of those readers who wish to read a whole page at a time and important information is cited to help readers locate sources for more in depth study.

Headings and Subheadings

Headings and sub-headings are used to break up the article into sections and to help readers navigate to the content they seek. Where more than one such headings exist, the software automatically builds a table of contents at the top of the page. Like newspaper headlines, the best headings should tell a very brief story in themselves, and should be as clear as possible. There are no hard and fast rules for how to break a subject down into sections, though chronological order is often useful in this context. It is generally best to avoid wikilinks in headings - instead use the first such mention in the text below.

Clarity

When writing a page, you should assume interest but not necessarily prior knowledge on a topic. Be careful to explain technical terms before you use them, linking to a full article elsewhere if available. Each page should have a lede (introductory section) at the top which gives an overview of the topic. This can be more than one paragraph, but for technical reasons, the first paragraph should be less than 500 characters (~4 lines).

Focus

The ideal page (and page section) remains focused on its title; while content inevitably touch on a variety of topics, material is presented from for a readership primarily interested in that title. If sections get overly long, consider whether they can naturally be broken into sub-sections. If pages get over long, consider moving a larger section or two to its own page, replacing it with a few lines to summarize the material moved, and use template:FA to point to the new page.

References

Citing sources is an essential way to help readers estimate the creditworthiness or otherwise of an article, so is highly recommended. If an article has references, it will need a subsection (generally the very last) entitled References.

Names

Full article: WikiSpooks:Standardisation

English has considerable flexibility which it is expeditious to curtail, particularly as regards names of pages, if links are to work correctly. Note that people's names should generally be devoid of a title (so Muammar Gaddafi, not Colonel Gaddafi), and pagenames should be in the singular (False flag, not False flags).

Emphasis

Sometimes you may wish to emphasise a particular word or phrase. Italics are a good way to convey emphasis. Bold is usually best avoided in ordinary text. BLOCK CAPITALS, or <big> - AKIN TO SHOUTING - ARE NOT CONDUCIVE TO A PRODUCTIVE DEBATE. Many of the topics on Wikispooks are matters of life and death, about which very strong feelings are to be expected. Nevertheless, please seek out well chosen words to express yourself, rather than resorting to formatting, which has a rapidly diminishing rate of returns.

Article size

There are no hard and fast rules about article size, but bear in mind that readers have a finite concentration span, and a set of shorter hyperlinked articles is generally more useful than one very long article. Wikipedia's article on article size is a useful read. In particular, extended quotes from documents are not suitable for WikiSpooks articles, which are intended to be a synthesis of multiple opinions.

There is no restriction on article size for pages in the document: namespace, so best practice for referencing documents is to post the original in its entirety as a document, then attach it to the article using SMW. To do this, include the complete (case-sensitive) article name on the list of that document's subjects.

Wikispooks Specifics

While it has plenty of similarities with Wikipedia, WikiSpooks also has differences. The most significant is its scepticism towards is the official narratives promoted by the institutions of the powers that be such as the commercially-controlled media.

"Official narrative"

Many deep political topics have a single official narrative which is widely promulgated through commercially-controlled media such as newspapers, TV and hence Wikipedia. This typically includes a set of correct and widely agreed facts and is a departure point for many who are trying to dig deeper, it is often a good starting point for a page. So, while extensive narration of the official narrative is unwanted, it is often good style to have an "Official Narrative" subsection as the first section of a page which briefly summarises the story promoted by the establishment. This often has a subsection "Problems" which outline some of its shortcomings that are discussed in more detail in the article.

"See also"

Although many pages in Wikispooks have a "see also" section, these are usually the older, poorly maintained sections. Since the upgrade to SMW technology, it is much preferred to avoid this section and instead use appropriate SMW-based methods (e.g. Template:SMWDocs) to link in relevant material. Where a subject is linked in from the text, it is generally better not to add a separate listing under "See also" since this unnecessarily lengthens pages. "See also" sections may be helpful in exceptional cases, but other methods of linking in documents are generally to be preferred.

Original Documents

Full article: WikiSpooks:Document Editing Rules

Sometimes, you will find a document which would be good to include in its entirety on the site. Copying to Wikispooks is preferred to linking if there is a chance that the link could go dead or be changed (e.g. news stories from commercially-controlled media sources which are sanitized because they accidentally let something slip) or maybe because the original is not yet on WWW (e.g. it is a scan of hardcopy). In this case, post it to a page in the "document:" namespace so it is preserved in its original form.

Name	description
(Main)	This is for ordinary pages, it is not shown
Talk	Every main page has an accompanying 'talk' page, for discussions about the page content.
Document	For text documents. The content should not be edited.
File	For posting other files, such as images or PDFs.
Wikispooks	For pages about this project (such as this one)
Help	For help about the software used.
User	Every user has their own page which they can use, for example, to introduce themselves

Namespaces

Full article: Help:Namespaces

The Mediawiki software which runs Wikispooks organises the material into separate sections, called 'namespaces'. This page, WikiSpooks:Style guide for example, is in the "WikiSpooks:" namespace, used for pages which are about this project. There are a couple of dozen namespaces, but most are not so important. The most important ones are:

Templates

Full article: Wikispooks:Templates

The template: namespace is for short programs which make some of the page for you. To invoke them, begin "{{" and end "}}". For example, the "Full article: Wikispooks:Templates" link just above is created by Template:FA, and it the result of the template call: "{{FA|Wikispooks:Templates}}". To see all the available templates, see the templates category.

Where To Start?

Full article: WikiSpooks:To Do

WikiSpooks is a big project and there is quite a lot going on. Don't be put off by the wide choice. The 'To Do' section details a number of ways that it is easy to get started.