MuseWiki:Guidelines

MuseWiki, wiki for the band Muse

Naming conventions

Don't use capitals, just like Wikipedia. I'll read up on that article about conventions, hopefully we'll make this page details and people can understand how to wiki on the musewiki more :D

Do's

• Edit anything you see that is incorrect.
• Categorise pages, most of them should have a category, though don't use Muse as a category that much unless its band related.
• Suggest ways you think the MuseWiki could be improved. These suggestions should go on the talk page most relevant to the suggestion you have. These suggestions should be:
  • Future proof.
  • Easier or just as easy to comprehend as the old way of doing things.
  • Less of an effort to maintain, or just as easy to maintain
  • Clear and unambiguous.
• Read your edits one or two times. Multiple revisions are confounding when searching through them and a waste of database space.
  • If you are making several large, different changes, then it may be wise to split the changes into revisions in a way that makes sense, so that one may be easily reverted without the others.
• Take a look at the revision logs or the page itself before making a change. Sometimes things which appear unideal or wrong have a reason to be that way.
  • The purpose of the section you are changing for instance, might have a specific context that you won't be aware of unless you get a feel for the page as a whole.
• Use objective language. Loaded words, as they're referred to on the Wikipedia, may give text a specific viewpoint.
• Make big changes in an external editor. Browser crashes have a nasty habit of being annoying, as do revision conflicts.
• Cite, cite, cite.

Don'ts

• Add your own opinion on articles, you can quote media articles, but general opinions should be prohibited to reduce the biasness of something.
  • In general information taken from quotes should be paraphrased. If the quotation expresses a view, then that view should be factorised as much as possible. The rest of the quote should be paraphrased and the subjective point should be quotated inline. Typically the quoted parts should therefore be limited in the order of one or two words.
• Discuss things on the main article pages, if you think something is wrong and would like to discuss it, use the talk pages.
• Register unless you actually want to help out, its a waste of time (and database space) registering and you're not getting anything back from it.
• State the same thing within the same article in different terms. Great for marketing, bad for an encyclopedia.