ProleWiki:Editorial guidelines

We have editorial conventions that help maintain a consistent style throughout the whole wiki. If you usually edit articles, it may be cool to once in a while discuss ideas in the discussion page and check what has been decided.

The best thing you can do before contributing is to see already made articles and check their format, how they're written, etc. In any case, this reference may also help.

Articles

Title

The title of the article should be always be capitalized (the MediaWiki engine already does that), and the rest of the article title should be as lowercase as possible, i.e.,

Socialism with Chinese characteristics

instead of

"Socialism with Chinese Characteristics."

This approach makes reading sometimes easier.

Body

When mentioning the subject of the article in the article body for the first time, use bold. This was adopted from Wikipedia's conventions, i.e.,

Title of the article: Historical materialism.
Body of article: "Historical materialism broadly refers to applying (...)"

To avoid

Avoid using external links in the article body. External links should be put in a "External links" section at the end of the article.

Referencing

Cited works

There will be many cases where it's not always clear when to lowercase and when to uppercase certain expressions. Cited works in other media usually have all their words capitalized, but we use a lowercase approach with italics when citing work titles to improve readability, i.e.,

Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy

instead of

"Ludwig Feuerbach And The End of Classical German Philosophy"

In this case, the capitalized words are either proper nouns or nationalities, and the italics are used to show this is a cited work. When we cite works written by famous marxists, we put their short name and title of work, i.e.,

Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy

Fanon: The wretched of the Earth

Marx: Critique of the Gotha program

To avoid

• References should not have a space before them:

Jeff Bezos is a parasite.^[1] (do)
Jeff Bezos is a parasite. ^[1] (don't)

• References should not go before punctuations

Without revolutionary theory,^[1] there can be no revolutionary movement.^[2] (do)
Without revolutionary theory^[1], there can be no revolutionary movement^[2]. (don't)

External sources

Avoid using external sources in the article body! To refer to external sources, link it in a header or as a reference at the bottom of the article, as seen here.

Translations

As of November 20, 2020, we still have a shared server for our hosting plan. For reasons that shouldn't matter for the moment, subpages (the page for language translations, i.e., ProleWiki:Editorial conventions/en) do not support the Visual Editor. This will be fixed in the future.

We are still learning how we can ease the translation process. For that, the best way to understand our current difficulties and how we can improve them is to try it out and share experiences with us. At the moment, we are not enforcing all articles to have their content language subpage ("/en", "/it"), but we can try it out in the "ProleWiki:" namespace.