Biographical Wiki:Manual of Style

From Biographical Wiki

Again, thanks to the folks at Homestar Runner Wiki for some of the following examples:

1 Naming a Page
2 Punctuation
- 2.1 Quotation marks
- 2.2 Apostrophe

[edit] Naming a Page

When you add a biography to BiographicalWiki.com you must create a new page for that biography. The new page's name will be the name of the person in the biography.

In order to keep the page names consistent please remember these recommendations:

Given name(s) first followed by the last name

Example: Martha Ann Truman

The name is followed by a the birth and death years in parentheses

Example: Martha Ann Truman (1850-1892)

Women are always listed by their maiden name

If only a birth year is known, leave the death year blank

Example: (1850-)

If only a death year is known, leave the birth year blank

Example: (-1892)

Some notes:

Including the birth and death years will help people find the right person by looking only at page names
If you don't know the birth or death year for biography, leave the parentheses off of the page name
Page names can be changed later
If a person is living, DO NOT create a page for them. Instead, link them to the Living page

[edit] Punctuation

[edit] Quotation marks

Use double quotation marks for most quoted material.
Use single quotation marks for quotations within quotations.
As for whether to include punctuation inside or outside the quotation marks, there isn't really one standard, due to the vastly different things that get quoted. In the second example here, there's no doubt as to whether or not the punctuation is part of the link. Use your best judgment based on which particular style fits a given sentence.

For running text, punctuation inside the quotation marks is usually appropriate:

"One o' them said they'd buy me lunch. But I don't see nobody taking me to Chick-fil-A."

For other things, it is sometimes better to put the punctuation outside the quotation marks:

One of the links in the navbar is called "move".

Again, when pasting text into the wiki that you typed in another editor, be careful that you haven't used "curly quotes" (i.e., ‘ ’ and “ ”). Microsoft Word also likes to change these silently. Single and double quotation marks, as well as apostrophes, should always be written with straight quotes (i.e., ' ' and " "). Again, using a plain-text editor, like Notepad, will prevent this problem before it happens.