Style Guidelines

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Wikinvest articles should conform to standard rules of English grammar and usage. One way of presenting information is often as good as another, but consistency makes Wikinvest more coherent and understandable.

There are a number of excellent online style guides that discuss grammar and usage in more depth. Online, the Chicago Manual of Style (subscription or 30-day free trial) is the standard across a variety of disciplines. CMS Crib Sheet (free) provides a useful summary of key Chicago Manual concepts and rules.

[edit] Clarity and Tone

Summary: be concise and understandable. Avoid profanity, netspeak/leetspeak, and slang.

Always write as clearly as possible. Although it is often tempting, even intuitive, to try to make writing sound more formal and professional by overusing industry terminology and multipart sentences, this should be avoided. Wikinvest's goal is to present difficult and prohibitively convoluted information in a clear and intuitive manner, not to become a free source of the same convolutions. If you do use industry terminology, make sure to briefly explain unfamiliar phrases (or link to an explanation). Be especially careful to avoid redundancies.

[edit] Use a Professional Tone

Always maintain a professional tone. This doesn't mean that you have to go hunting for a thesaurus if you're writing a company article (on the contrary--please, no excessive thesaurus use!). However, it does mean that profanity, netspeak and leetspeak (eg. lol, n006), and slang ("this company's about to get knocked" or "WORD," for instance) are strictly prohibited on all public pages. Rules are laxer on Discussion and private user pages, but please remain respectful. Use the "rule of print"--if something wouldn't appear in a reputable newspaper, steer clear.

[edit] Formatting Conventions

See also: Basic Wiki Markup.

Use the heading system (see the Tips tab, to the right of the main text area in Editing mode) to organize company articles. In general, group information around content themes, not chronologically. Read existing articles to get an idea of which headings to use. (Please glance through the Content Guidelines before making changes!).

In general, use the '==' (level two) headings throughout the article to introduce new article sections, as well as levels 3-5 for subsections.

[edit] Signing an Article

Never use the signature button or the four-tilde wiki markup command to sign an article. All articles have a history view--this serves as Wikinvest's collaborative byline. Here, anyone can see which changes were made by whom. Articles also have a Top Contributors box, which uses a points system to automatically display the names of users who have contributed very significantly to a particular article.

Signing is appropriate and customary in the Discussion pages--here, what you write is truly your own, and everyone benefits from your name appearing after what you say. Actual Wikinvest articles are all the product of collaborative efforts, however. No single person owns a Wikinvest article, and we can't sign what we don't own.

Thanks to Wikipedia and its contributors for sharing their help section and policies with us, from which portions of this article are drawn. This help content is licensed under the GNU GFDL