HaskellWiki:Guidelines

Currently, there are no “official” guidelines for this wiki. What follows are some unofficial guidelines, contributed by different users.

Unofficial guidelines

Page titles

What follows are some guidelines for page titles. Currently, the page titles on this wiki adhere more or less to these guidelines.

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.

-- Wolfgang Jeltsch

Titles for sections, subsections, etc.

Each page has a title which is automatically shown near the top of the page (currently centered and in red). So it doesn't make sense to put a single level 1 headline on the top of the page. (At the moment, you will see this on a few pages of this wiki. I suppose this is a legacy which comes from copying content from the old website to this wiki.)

For top-level structuring, level 1 headlines (the ones denoted by single equals signs in the source) should be used. It is semantically incorrect to use level 2 headlines for this purpose. I note that level 1 headlines are currently rather large and in a font that might not be preferable. However, the solution to thi

Editing

When editing a 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.

-- BrettGiles