HaskellWiki:Guidelines

Here you will find guidelines for editing this wiki.

General principles

Please bear in mind that our first audience is those expecting a web-site on Haskell and not necessarily interested in this "wiki" thing. The default style, for instance, tries to make the wiki-ness as discreet as possible for readers not logged in.

Page structure

There shall not be a single top level section. If you divide a page into sections, please introduce multiple sections at the top level. That means, the sections should form a true forest instead of just a tree. Using a single top level section is very untypical and is also not needed for giving the whole text a headline since there is the page title for this issue.

Page titles

These are some guidelines for page titles:

1. Page titles not only affect a page's URL but they are also shown at the top of the page. Therefore, it is important that a page title is a title, not a mnemonic “path name”. I strongly doubt that we need such mnemonic names but if they are introduced they should denote only redirects to the actual page.
2. On the other hand, it is good if titles are not unnecessarily long so that URLs have reasonable size. Especially, redundant occurences of the word “Haskell” in titles should be avoided. If a page on HaskellWiki is just named “Compilers and interpreters”, it should be clear that it refers to “Haskell compilers and interpreters”, so the extra “Haskell” is not needed.
3. Titles should use sentence-style capitalization (see [1]). Capitalizing more words seems to be only appropriate in larger documents like books. If slashes are used to denote hierarchy, each part of the hierarchical title should be handled as if it were a title itself, i.e., its first word should be capitalized.

Headlines

Level 1 headlines (the ones written as = Headline =) shall not be used. Instead, a headline which is logically at the top level shall be implemented as a level 2 headline (i.e, as == Headline ==). The reason is that the page title and the level 1 headlines are both implemented as h1 elements in the page's HTML. They are distinguished by using different HTML classes indeed, but this distinction is too light. For example, a browser which doesn't support CSS would probably render page titles and level 1 headlines the same way.

Like page titles, headlines shall use sentence-style capitalization [2].

Punctuation

If would be great if you would use the punctuation symbols which are used in professional documents like “, ” and — instead of their ASCII workarounds like " and -. If you use an X server with a keymap like mine, you can get “ and ” with AltGr + V and AltGr + B.

Editing

When editing the wiki, the bottom of the editing page has a place to put a summary. It is considered good form to put a one line comment about any changes you are making. As well, you have the capability to mark an edit as minor. Please use this only for changing format, spelling, fixing bad links or minor word re-arrangement. It should not be used when adding whole new sections, a signficant number of links, new pages or rewrites of the page.