Ideas Wiki:Manual of Style

The Manual of Style (often abbreviated as MoS or MOS) is a style manual for all Ideas Wiki articles. This is its main page, covering certain topics (such as punctuation) in full and summarizing the key points of others. The detail pages cross-referenced in various sections, and also linked via this page's menu and listed at Project:Manual of Style/Contents, provide more specific guidance on some topics. In case of discrepancy, over its detail pages and the Simplified Manual of Style.

The Manual of Style documents Ideas Wiki's house style. Its goal is to make using Ideas Wiki easier and more intuitive by promoting clarity and cohesion, while helping editors write articles with consistent and precise language, layout, and formatting. Plain English works best; avoid ambiguity, jargon, and vague or unnecessarily complex wording.

Style and formatting should be consistent within an article, though not necessarily throughout Ideas Wiki. Where more than one style is acceptable, editors should not change an article from one of those styles to another without a good reason. Edit warring over optional styles is unacceptable. If discussion cannot determine which style to use in an article, defer to the style used by the first major contributor. If a style or similar debate becomes intractable, see if a rewrite]] can make the issue moot.

Discuss style issues on the MoS talk page. Some of the past discussions that led to decisions on aspects of style guidance are recorded at the MoS register.

Article titles
When choosing an article's title, refer to Project:Article titles policy. A title should be a recognizable name or description of the topic that is natural, sufficiently precise, concise, and consistent with the titles of related articles. If these criteria are in conflict, they should be balanced against one another.

Note the following:


 * Capitalize the title's initial letter (except in rare cases, such as eBay), but otherwise follow sentence case, not title case; e.g., Funding of UNESCO projects, not Funding of UNESCO Projects. This does not apply where title case would be expected were the title to occur in ordinary prose.
 * To italicize a title, add the template near the top of the article.
 * Do not use A, An, or The as the first word (Economy of the Second Empire, not The economy of the Second Empire), unless it is an inseparable part of a name (The Hague) or it is part of the title of a work (A Clockwork Orange, The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien).
 * Titles should normally be nouns or noun phrases: Early life, not In early life.
 * The final character should not be a punctuation mark unless it is part of a name (Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!) or an abbreviation (Inverness City F.C.), or a closing round bracket or quotation mark is required (John Palmer (schooner)).

The guidance contained elsewhere in the MoS, particularly (below) applies to all parts of an article, including the title.