Wiki Style Guide

This is a style guide to help us make the form of pages on the wiki more consistent.

Contents

  1. Page naming and linking conventions
    1. Renaming pages
  2. General form
    1. D * CategoryWiki - meta-information about working on the wiki
  3. Content considerations
    1. Version numbers
    2. Jargon
    3. Linking to builtin help
    4. Emphasis
    5. Referring to commands
    6. Referring to configuration files and other files
    7. Describing changeset graphs and other diagrams
    8. Discussion
    9. Icons
    10. Other
  4. Mercurial naming conventions
  5. Section headings
  6. "See also" sections
  7. Useful categories
  8. Translating pages
  9. Home pages
  10. See also

1. Page naming and linking conventions

Page names should all conform to WikiCamelCase so that editors and users don't need to remember the non-semantic content of page names. Some corner cases:

In general, it's preferrable to use singular for page names. For example, Subrepository is better than Subrepositories.

Page titles should be 'book title capitalized':

The page title should match the page name aside from the differences in style noted above.

Page names and titles should favor spelling out acronyms. When there is a common acronym for all or part of the page name/title, it should be included in parentheses in the page title. Example:

To link to a page, you should generally use appropriate lowercase as the anchor text: 

  [[InformationForDevelopers|information for developers]]

If the same term appears multiple times on a page, link only the first appearance.

1.1. Renaming pages

When renaming an existing page to comply with the naming convention, please add a redirect from the old page to the new one of the form: 

#REDIRECT NewPageName

2. General form

Pages should have the following general form: 

#pragma section-numbers 2
= Page Title =

A brief overview.

<<TableOfContents>>

== Section 1 ==

Section 1 text.

== Section 2 ==

Section 2 text.

----
CategoryA CategoryB

<!> Select NewPageTemplate to get this template when creating a page.

Pages with only a couple paragraphs of text may collapse this to: 

= Page Title =

Full text.

----
CategoryA CategoryStub

Please be sure pages are added to appropriate categories.

2.1. D * CategoryWiki - meta-information about working on the wiki

Pages intended only for developer use (especially for upcoming features) should be marked with the following at the top of the page:

Note:

This page is primarily intended for developers of Mercurial. 

<<Include(A:dev)>>

Similarly, pages on features that haven't been ratified should consider a marker like the following immediately after the title:

<!> This is a proposed feature, last updated Oct 2010.

Be sure to link to CategoryDeveloper and CategoryNewFeatures as appropriate.

3. Content considerations

The wiki is intended as a primary source of documentation, not as an informal discussion. Thus, wiki pages should aim to use a formal third-person style.

3.1. Version numbers

Versions of Mercurial younger than one year (ie three major releases) are considered new, and references to their features should include a version number. Such reference should eventually be dropped.

3.2. Jargon

See Mercurial's built-in glossary for accepted terminology for common Mercurial concepts.

3.3. Linking to builtin help

Links to command help should use interwiki links like this:

help on annotate 

[[Cmd:annotate|help on annotate]]

Similarly, links to built-in help topics should look like this:

help on revsets 

[[Topic:revsets|help on revsets]]

3.4. Emphasis

Generally, use italics for normal emphasis rather than bold. Bold may be useful for diagnostic check-points to help our more patience-impaired users.

3.5. Referring to commands

Commands should generally be described as a sequence of operations and their typical output in a preformatted block: 

$ hg init
$ hg add foo
foo: No such file or directory

When referring to commands inline (eg 'hg revert -a'), use quoted monospace: 

'`hg revert -a`'

3.6. Referring to configuration files and other files

Files (eg .hg/hgrc) should be referred to using monospace italic: 

''`.hg/hgrc`''

3.7. Describing changeset graphs and other diagrams

The Mercurial wiki has a built-in facility for drawing arbitrary graphs:

3.8. Discussion

Questions or discussion about content should be moved to a subpage named Talk, eg WikiStyleGuide/Talk, though generally such discussion is even better directed to the mailing lists or IRC.

3.9. Icons

We use some of Moin's icons regularly:

(in general, use of Moin's actual smiley icons should be avoided)

3.10. Other

By default, you should consider Wikipedia's Manual of Style for resolving other fine points of style. If a point is encountered often enough in our wiki, consider adding a section for it here.

4. Mercurial naming conventions

5. Section headings

6. "See also" sections

If a page wants to include a list of other relevant pages, it should use a "See also" section. This should be a second level header containing a list of other pages as the last section on the page: 

...

== See also ==

 * WikiStyleGuide - how to style wiki pages
 * WikiCleanup - strategy for improving wiki content

----
CategoryWiki

7. Useful categories

8. Translating pages

<!> Do not add original content in non-English languages, we can not check it for accuracy

Translated pages should prefix the original page name with the English name of the target translation language. For instance, Tutorial should become FrenchTutorial for a French translation. Please add the iso-639-1 language code on top of the page (see HelpOnLanguages). For example, on a page written in French add 

#language fr

on the first line of the wiki text of the page. Translated pages should not add themselves to the English category pages, they should instead create their own parallel category pages.

Do not link to English categories, as that will automatically pollute the English category pages. Instead link to a corresponding category for that language, eg FrenchCategoryWindows.

Translations should be linked from the original page via a list below the category list:

Français, 日本語 

[[FrenchWikiStyleGuide|Français]], [[JapaneseWikiStyleGuide|日本語]]

Translations should also include a a similar link back to original English page, which may be more current.

{i} Translators should consider using the 'Subscribe' action to track changes to the original page and keep their translations updated.

9. Home pages

Home pages for wiki editors should:

They should not:

10. See also

CategoryWiki

中文

WikiStyleGuide (last edited 2024-06-28 05:00:52 by AntonShestakov)