Flight Sim Wiki: Manual of Style
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This Manual of Style is a set of a editing and formatting standards which allows for consistency of articles throughout the The Flight Simulator Wiki.
When this style guide dictates a style on a particular topic, it should be followed regardless of the style guides for any other wiki. In cases where a style is not directed by this guide, the Wikipedia Manual of Style should be referenced as a best practice and editors will apply their best judgment with the overall aim of maintaining overall consistency across the wiki.
Editors should not make edits to this guide which would cause confusion or otherwise make/require sweeping changes to the wiki without first discussing and reaching consensus on this article's talk page. The editor proposing a sweeping change to this wiki will be responsible for implementing the change across all existing articles in a timely manner, either individually or by leading a team of editors to do so.
Style rules
There are a few editing rules which are imperative to be followed. Violations of the items in this section (only) will be enforced by the administrators as rules violations.
- All content must be compliant with the wiki's Conduct Policy
- Article content must be written in third-person. First or second person prose is only allowed in guides.
Infoboxes
- All articles should have an infobox to summarize the key data points
- Exception: articles which consist primary of a list (e.g., Marketplace/List of Marketplace Airports)
- Exception: subpages meant purely to be transcluded
General text formatting
Consistency of text formatting is important because it allows for familiar readers to quickly find their desired content within an article and prevents confusion.
- The first sentence of an article should contain a brief introduction of the subject matter to pre-emptively answer "am I reading the desired article?"
- The name of the article (or where not possible, a rephrasing of it) should appear toward the beginning of the sentence and be bolded
- Paragraphs should be no less than two sentences long and be separated by one blank line if editing using the source editor.
- Underlining text is to be avoided in prose as it can appear to an unfamiliar reader as a hyperlink
- Using colors similar to the wikilink color should be avoided
- Bold and italics are to be used sparingly in prose and only when drawing the user's attention is necessary and beneficial
- Wikitext must be used instead of HTML tags when the capability to do is available
- Examples: bold, italics, links, headings, intentions, lists, and embedding images/video
Lists
Lists are a useful method of organizing data which is related to each other, particularly in a series.
- Unordered (bulleted) lists should be used as the default list type
- Ordered (numbered) lists should be used only when the order of the list items is particularly important or when it aids the user to easily see the number of items within the list.
- Term-Description lists should only be used in template documentation
- Mixed or nested lists should generally not be used on this wiki
Tables
Tables are an excellent tool for presenting data which yields itself to a tabular format. Examples of good applications of tables include:
- Presenting numerical statistics for easy side-by-side comparison
- Formatting data where horizontal separation of data points aids readability
- Cases where presentation in a list would potentially create confusion or hamper article readability
Tables should not be used for:
- Overall formatting or presentation of articles
- Data sets which require many columns
- Consider breaking into paragraph-separated prose or section/segment the table instead
- Infoboxes, banners, message boxes, navboxes, or any other templates.
- Exception: Templates using tables created prior to 2021-10-01 are exempted until such time that they can be converted to native HTML