Sia Wiki:Manual of style

This page documents the various style guidelines regarding proper writing technique for all mainspace articles on this wiki. These are standards designed to aid editors in the production of articles with clear, consistent, and precise language and formatting.

The guidelines listed here explicitly apply to all mainspace articles, but are encouraged for use in other namespaces.

General
Please use accurate and consistent spelling, grammar and punctuation wherever possible. Avoid using caps and unnecessary formatting at all times.

Album names should always be italicized, whereas song tracks should always be enclosed with a pair of double quotes to depict the appropriate hierarchical order.

Please do not create previously deleted articles until there is enough information to substantiate them.

Naming
Article titles should be based on official names.

In case of artists, the stage name should be used, while the full name should be a redirect to it. In case of albums and songs, the title should have the first letter of every word capitalized, except for prepositions.

Disambiguations
Several articles having the same title should have the article with the original title as a disambiguation, while the others should have the title followed by the subject type enclosed in a pair of parentheses. This does not apply to two articles with the same title. In this case, the article on a more prominent subject should take precedence over the one with less prominence. For instance, for OnlySee, the album would take the title, while the song of the same name will follow the parentheses rule.

Formatting
The first appearance of the name of the article must be written in bold. For emphasis, use italics as opposed to bold or underlined text and capitals. Use level two headings for main sections and lower level headings for any subsequent subsections. Infoboxes, if relevant, should be placed first before any subject content in the article. Article management templates should also be prioritized over content. If these templates are used for a specific section, then they should be placed just below the section title.

Avoid using lists in main sections. Avoid unnecessary formatting that makes no visual difference to the text rendered without the formatting. Examples include empty span and p tags.

Grammar
Use of accurate and consistent spelling, grammar and punctuation in all articles is imperative. Use of both American and British English is allowed, as long as they are consistent within articles. Usage of British English is encouraged on articles with British spelling in titles, Colour the Small One for instance.

Please do not use regular dashes (-) in articles. Instead use an en dash (–) surrounded by a single whitespace character, or an em dash (—) which is placed directly between two words. Any details mentioned within parentheses should be rewritten and merged into the parent sentence.

Please do not use contractions within articles.

Categories
All articles must be categorized, as categorizing is extremely important. It helps in accumulating similar articles in a common place from where they can be easily accessed for further reading. If an article is not categorized, it becomes hard to locate and improve it, especially if it is on a less prominent subject.

Pages categorized under a subcategory of a parent category should not be categorized under the parent category. For instance, "Chandelier" should be correctly categorized under "Singles" and not "Songs", as "Singles" is a subcategory of the "Songs" category.

Ideally, all articles and categories should be a member of the Browse category, whether directly or under another subcategory.

Naming
Images should be named in such a way that they are easily searchable. It is generally preferred that images be named according according to what is being depicted in them. For instance, Sia performing live.png is preferred over ambiguous titles such as Sia.png and the like.

Images must have appropriate names. Sia and Ziegler at Grammys.png and Bird Set Free on SNL.jpg are appropriate names; tumblr12345.png and img78xsJ.jpg are not. Naming files in languages other than English is also strongly discouraged, as searching becomes difficult in this case.

Usage
Images are used as a visual supplement to content. They should not be used excessively. All images that are uploaded to the wiki must have some relevancy to the subject of the wiki. Ideally, all images should appear on at least one mainspace article. While uploading images not used on mainspace articles is allowed, excessive upload of such images will subject them to deletion with or without prior warning.

The pertinence rule does not extend to images that are used in specific areas of the site, that may or may not be related to the subject of the wiki. These images can be found under the Site images category.

Extensions
The most common file extensions are jpg and png. However, images of jpg format have a lossy compression and suffer a loss in quality each time info is saved. Thus, png format is preferred for images that are prominently visible and otherwise if possible.

Categorizing
All images must be categorized. Ideally, all images should be a member of the Images category, whether directly or under another subcategory.