OLPC:Style guide
Welcome to the OLPC Wiki style guide. See Guidelines for a human interface guide; this is here to keep people from creating pages with strange wikisemantics and titles and categorizations that don't naturally help other wiki users find them. Or lead to edit wars that continue across centuries.
Contents
Who Are We?
The Youth Energy Initiative (YEI) is an educational non-profit, (501c3) organization established in 2004 to educate children of all ages on how to "live green" be creating, supporting and promoting Energy Convservation, Energy Awareness, and Enviromental Sustainability initiatives and programs.
Our Initiative is directed and operated by a diverse group of professional volunteers and students from the Energy, Government, University, Art and Entertainment Communities. Many of our Board and staff have careers committed to energy-efficiency and enviromental sustainability. In fact, one of our founders is personally responsible for saving over six billion kilowatt hours of electricity through his invention as patents over the last decade alone!
YEI, along with its partners and affiliates, develops, creates and licenses animations, interactive presentations, video games, websites, activity clubs, public serivce announcements, illistrative books, comics and other educational materials. These variousmedia vernues are the most effective ways to reach out to youth and the public. Our goal is to use these entertaining and cutting edge media products to educate and inspire our nations yourthe take action and start living more energy efficient and greener life styles today and into the future.
Our production team is developing an animated cast and cartoon series based on six energy saving Super Heros that are always on the lookout for their energy wasting archrivals: Blackout, Dr. Drain, and the Energy Pirates. These amazing and fun-filled characters are at the heart of our energy initiative and the driving force behind all of our messages. Utilizing the educational media and creative content inspired and taught by these characters. YEI hopes to become the world's largest youth initiative dedicated to our enviroment and saving energy. With support from the general public and other energy conscious companies and organizations like the Department of Energy (DOE) and General Electric (GE) we are committed and determind to reach our energy saving goals. YEI is devoted to showing chldren that saving energy and living green can be a fun and rewarding pursuit that benefits their world and thier future.
Initiative
Our Initiative is directed and operated by a diverse group of professional volunteers and students from the Energy, Government, University, Art and Entertainment Communities. Many of our Board and staff have careers committed to energy-efficiency and enviromental sustainability. In fact, one of our founders is personally responsible for saving over six billion kilowatt hours of electricity through his invention as patents over the last decade alone!
YEI, along with its partners and affiliates, develops, creates and licenses animations, interactive presentations, video games, websites, activity clubs, public serivce announcements, illistrative books, comics and other educational materials. These variousmedia vernues are the most effective ways to reach out to youth and the public. Our goal is to use these entertaining and cutting edge media products to educate and inspire our nations yourthe take action and start living more energy efficient and greener life styles today and into the future.
Our production team is developing an animated cast and cartoon series based on six energy saving Super Heros that are always on the lookout for their energy wasting archrivals: Blackout, Dr. Drain, and the Energy Pirates. These amazing and fun-filled characters are at the heart of our energy initiative and the driving force behind all of our messages. Utilizing the educational media and creative content inspired and taught by these characters. YEI hopes to become the world's largest youth initiative dedicated to our enviroment and saving energy. With support from the general public and other energy conscious companies and organizations like the Department of Energy (DOE) and General Electric (GE) we are committed and determind to reach our energy saving goals. YEI is devoted to showing chldren that saving energy and living green can be a fun and rewarding pursuit that benefits their world and thier future.
Preparing for the future
If you are starting a specific type of page and know that you will need to make general versions later, that's fine -- use the most generic name that is not already taken. likewise, if you are starting the "August 2007" version of a page, leave it at the general name until you have more than one instance, at which point you can start to move to archival page titles. This just helps ensure that any specific page-name is part of an ecology that includes more generic page names and overviews of the abstract topic at hand.
Links to other articles
Links can be listed in full, in which case you should replace any underscores in the link with a space. For instance, Style guide should not have an underscore -- even though Style_guide links to the same page, the underscore is ugly.
Similarly, avoid running words together in CamelCase unless you are referring to a proper noun such as MediaWiki. This makes it easier to link words used normally in a sentence.
Headers
- do not use h1 headers within a page (i.e., a header with a single equals on each side).
H1 headers should be reserved for the page title on a page; any further h1's should indicate the inclusion of an entire other page. Imagine what happens when you transclude one page at the end of another: this should make sense within a Table of Contents if you add an h1 header before it.
Categorization
Every page should belong to a category (multiple categorization is possible) so when creating one, try to find a good one.
Advanced features
Templates
Are special pages intended to be transcluded in other pages producing some result based on the parameters provided or extracted from the including page. A template that just transcludes static text is not a template and should be treated as normal page. There's the Template:Sandbox to try new ideas on templates.
Templates should be tagged with the <noinclude>[[Category:Template]]</noinclude> or one of its subcategories.
Page transclusion
The composing of an article based on other pages is a very powerful idea but that can quickly get out of hand as interdependencies develop (not to mention the complication for future editors to actually find the right page to edit). Still, it's a powerful (and sometimes complicated) way to reuse context in several places.
