ProleWiki:Editorial guidelines

We have editorial conventions that help maintain a consistent style throughout the whole wiki. This discusses mainly form, not content.

Don't forget that the best way to learn how we can maintain a consistent style is by looking at how other articles are built. You can suggest changes in the discussion page.

Content pages

Title

1. Use preferably sentence case in the title of our articles except in the case for proper nouns (only the first word of a sentence and proper nouns are capitalized).

   The economic basis of the withering away of the state (do)
   The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State (don't)

2. For countries, use the official state's name when titling a page. For example, our page is titled Russian Federation, with Russia redirecting there as the Federation is the most current incarnation of what is called Russia. Likewise, China redirects to the People's Republic of China.
3. For persons, use the most common name using the Latin alphabet, but remaining in the original language. See for example Deng Xiaoping (pinyin), Maximilien de Robespierre (not the entire name but the most common one), Hồ Chí Minh (with Vietnamese diacritics), Muammar Gaddafi (common transliteration from the original Arabic). Create redirects as needed to cover all possible spellings you can think of.
4. Be as specific as needed. For instance, the Russian revolution can mean both the 1905 Russian bourgeois revolution and the 1917 Russian socialist revolution. In this case, a title which already disambiguates this difference is ideal.

Body

1. In the introductory paragraph of an article, use bold for when the subject of the article is first mentioned. This ensures the subject of the article is cited more clearly.

Historical materialism

From ProleWiki, the proletarian encyclopedia

Historical materialism broadly refers to applying the philosophy of dialectical materialism to the study of social life.

Bluelinking and redlinking

I. Bluelinking: Blue links made to other articles should be made only when they are first introduced in the article. This is to prevent readers from getting distracted by excessive use of blue links.

(note how the second mention of Marxist-Leninist is not linked in the example)

ProleWiki is a Marxist–Leninist encyclopedia founded in September 2020 aiming to make information accessible to revolutionaries and those who wish to study revolutionary theory. We stand for the principles of anti-imperialism and we aim to combat the liberal hegemony in Western society by presenting a Marxist-Leninist understanding of political economy.

II. Blue links should also strictly be made in body text, never in headings. This is for readability reasons and coherence.

III. External links should not be used in the main body. If you need to use an external link as reference, then use it as citation. You can also create an "External links" section and put external sources there.

Citations

1. Avoid placing a citation after a space

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

2. Avoid placing a citation before punctuation

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)

References

Use our Citation template for books and scientific articles, and the Web citation template for material usually available online or periodicals, newspapers, etc. These options are available through Visual Editor.

Order of sections (headings)

The end of a page must always follow this order in its headings:

See Also [links to other internal pages]

Further Reading [links to books or articles]

External Links [links to outside pages]

References [created automatically with the References template]

Library

Title

• Book titles should be written in italics, followed by author. To do that, you can use the Title template or by using {{DISPLAYTITLE:''Title in italics''}} in source code editor. This is done so to differentiate articles written about the book in the main pages from the book itself in our library.

On authority, by Friedrich Engels

From ProleWiki, the proletarian encyclopedia

A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned. This summary mode of procedure is being abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look into the matter somewhat more closely. (...)