MEpedia:Manual of style
The following offers some style guidance for writing articles on MEpedia. Some of this requires familiarizing yourself with some of the basic formatting code used by MediaWiki, the software that powers both Wikipedia and MEpedia.
Key conventions
- Page titles and section headings: Always capitalise the first letter of page titles and links, subsequent words must start with a lower case letter (eg "Post-exertional malaise", "Muscle fatigability") unless they are proper names (eg "Royal Free Hospital", "Nancy Klimas", "United States") or acronyms (eg "HHV-6", "IL-7").
- Use of plurals in titles: Normal page articles should normally use the singular while category page articles should use the plural form.
- Chronological order: put oldest first, e.g., for Notable studies 2010 would go before 2018.
- #MEAction colors: red #E7453A, blue #0BA7CD, light gray a solid equivalent to #3B3E3F 50% fill - use rgba(59,62,63,0.5) for transparency or , dark gray #3B3E3F, white #FFFFF, use templates for colors, e.g.:
<span style="color:{{MEActionRed}}">This is red.</span>
<span style="color:{{MEActionBlue}}">This is blue.</span>
<span style="color:{{MEActionGray}}">This is (light) gray.</span>
<span style="color:{{MEActionDGray}}">This is dark gray.</span>
Dates and numbers
Dates
Dates should be in a consistent form and in US format: Jun 26, 2018; Jun 2018; or when the month is unknown, 2018. When manually inputting citations, use Jun 26, 2018; Jun 2018; or when the month is unknown, 2018.Dates entered in a different formatted, eg 2018-11-12, are automatically displayed using the MEpedia standard by the CS1 module.
Numbers
Names and titles
The first time a person is mentioned in an article, their full name, title and relevant highest degree(s) should be described in detail to provide context for the reader (e.g. Dr. Jane Doe, PhD, a professor of Immunology at the University of Y). From then on, they should be referred to only by last name, e.g. Doe (unless you need to add their first name, Jane Doe, to distinguish from a mention of John Doe.)
Dashes
Two forms of dash are used on MEpedia: en dash (–) and the longer em dash (—). To enter them, click on them in the Visual Editor's toolbar to the right of the "Insert" dropdown beneath the edit window, or enter them manually as – or —, respectively. Do not use a double hyphen (--) to stand in for a dash.
Punctuation and footnotes
Punctuation should appear before (rather than after) footnotes where possible.
Layout
Lead paragraph
Each entry should begin with a paragraph providing a summary of the whole. If the entry is very long, two or three paragraphs may be warranted.
Notable studies
The “Notable studies” section should list studies in chronological order and cite studies with a footnote, rather than an external link. However, following the footnote, you may optionally wish to add a parenthetical with external links to the paper's abstract or full text for reader convenience:
- 1993, How reliable is peer review of scientific abstracts? Looking back at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the Society of General Internal Medicine[1] (Abstract)
See also
The “See also” section is a list of links to other relevant MEpedia entries. In the event the list becomes unwieldy, consider trimming to only subjects not yet linked elsewhere in the entry. However, the importance of a given related topic may take precedence.
Other guidelines
Learn more
- #MEAction branding
- MediaWiki’s formatting help (e.g, bold, italics, bullets)
- MediaWiki: Creating internal, external and transwiki links
- Wikipedia Manual of Style
- Wikipedia: Chronological Order
