MMKB:Standards

This page describes the standards currently accepted for page formatting and composition by the MMWiki community. Please try to follow these standards when creating and editing pages.

General
A few guidelines that it is wise to follow when creating and editing wiki pages:

Always use the Summary box
When editing pages, always fill in the "Summary" box above the Save/Preview buttons before saving, and make sure that you fill it in with something useful describing the edit you made and, if it's not obvious, why. For example, "fixed spelling error" or "added fun fact" or "reverted from troll 127.0.0.1" are all acceptable. Saying "made some changes" or just filling in the name of the page is not helpful, because it's information that we already have. Making your Summaries accurate and useful makes it vastly easier for the rest of us to keep track of Recent Changes and keeps everybody happy.

Use the Minor Edit button appropriately
As a corollary to the above, if you're making a minor edit (e.g. fixing a spelling error or tweaking formatting), check the "This is a minor edit" button below the Summary box before saving the page. On the other hand, if you're making an addition, deletion, or other edit that changes the substance of a page (even if it's just a few words), do not mark the edit as minor. Again, this will make things easier for the rest of us.

Don't link to the current page
In other words, a page should not link to itself. Most pages that do so are actually just stubs with a link to edit the current page. This variety of self-link is OK but feel free to expand upon these articles and remove the stub tag.

Link once
A given article should only contain one link to any other page. If a page links to Mega Man in one place, then that should be the only link to Mega Man on that page. Typically this link should be the first instance of the term in the article. Long tables and lists, however, can contain a link at every instance.

Plainlinks
The code, is used to remove the http://megaman.wikicities.com/skins/monobook/external.png from external links. This class should only be used enclosing links within MMWiki which can not be linked to using the standard Link ]] format. Such links include All talk pages, Log pages, History pages, and several others. Use is not recommended in most cases due to possible confusion with an interwiki link, which would appear identical to an internal link of the plainlinks class.

Note that plainlinks should never be used with links to Mega Man, Fire Man., Dr. Light, or the Characters. The plainlinks tag causes problems with the accompanying icon.

Don't sign your edits
All contributions are appreciated, but if every user left their mark on every contribution they made, the wiki would be nothing but signatures. If you've made an edit that you're particularly proud of (such as a transcript or screenshot), the correct place to take credit is on your own user page. If you do not have a user account, we respect your anonymity, but your edits will remain anonymous, too.

Do sign your Talk posts
If you make a post on a discussion page, please sign it. If you have a user account, this is as easy as typing ~ at the end of your post. If you don't have a user account, just sign it with your name or nickname so everybody can tell who's who when reading long conversations. Even better, create an account anyway and use the signature method described. There really is no reason not to if you're going to stick around. Also, please try to keep discussions on the one talk page, not moving it to another talk page and replying.