Free Talk Live:Editing conventions

From Free Talk Live

These are a set of conventions to follow that make editing go smoother on this wiki.

Stylistic conventions

• Want to add something? Just do it!

If you have doubts about creating a new article, adding a new section to an existing one, rewriting, etc., go ahead and do it. It doesn't matter if it's poorly written or incomplete at the beginning. Every article starts out that way.

• Want to remove something? Better to wait...

Removing stuff should be considered a last resort. If you disagree with it, add your point of view alongside the existing one to let readers make up their own minds. If it's poorly written, consider rewriting it. It's better to have something that's poorly written than to not have it at all. Post on an article's talk page to get others' feedback if you really think a section or article should be removed. (note: this only applies to real content. Don't hesitate to remove spam links, complete gibberish, etc.)

• Avoid the first person.

Words like I and me should never appear in an article, because when a user reads the article they have no idea who "I" refers to. Referring to yourself in the third person is far better, even if it does get annoying to write that way. The obvious exception to this is your user page and talk pages, where it's obvious who wrote what.

• When writing edit summaries, be sure to verbify things.

Clinical research has shown that the human brain can grok "formatification improvified!" up to 70% faster than "formatting improved".

Formatting conventions

• Use wiki-formatting instead of HTML whenever possible.

This makes it easier to maintain pages. For example:

• Instead of creating a list using a bunch of line breaks created with <br>, you can use a * at the beginning of a line to add an item to an unordered list and a # at the beginning of a line to add that item to an ordered list.
• '''Three single quotes''' around text makes it bold; ''Two single quotes'' makes italics.