less_retarded_wiki/wiki_style.md

Wiki Style

This outlines the style and rules of this Wiki that should ensure "quality" and consistency. You should read this before contributing.

If you contribute, add yourself to wiki authors! You can also join us on the Island.

Rules

1. Everything is public domain under CC0 to which all contributors agree. No one owns what we write here.
2. No fair use or even unfrair use. We want this Wiki to be as free as possible and don't thread the fine legal lines. That means you can't directly include anything on this Wiki if it's copyrighted, even if it's under a free license. So generally avoid any copy pasting and rather try to write everything yourself.
3. Stay on topic, this Wiki is CENSORED: spam, too much of completely non-related text, shitty things, capitalist propaganda and similar are not to be had here.

Style

• Don't line-break paragraphs (a pragraph is on a single line). The reasoning is that a text manually formatted to specific width is hard to edit. It's easier to switch to auto-line breaking in your editor.
• Avoid unicode, highly prefer ASCII, for the sake of maximum compatibility and simplicity. Use of unicode has to be greatly justified.
• Each page shall start with a heading (which may not correspond to article file name).
• I've finally decided that with certain exceptions headings should be written like this: Each Word Of A Heading Is Capitalized. This is for simplicity.
• Filenames of articles shall use a lowercase snake_case.
• This isn't Wikipedia, memes, opinions and uncensored truths are allowed (and welcome).
• The style of this wiki is inspired by the classic hacker culture works such as the WikiWikiWeb and Jargon File.
• Writing style should be relaxed and in many parts informal. Formality is used where it is useful (e.g. definitions), most of other text can benefit from being written as a tech conversation among friends.
• Political incorectness, slurs and "offensive speech" is highly encouraged.
• Images: for now don't embed images. ASCII art can be used in many places instead of an image. Thousand words are worth a picture. Non-embedding links to images are okay.
• You can leave comments right in the text of articles, e.g. like this: { I disagree with this shit. ~drummyfish }.

Articles should be written to be somewhat readable and understandable to tech savvy people who already know something about technology, i.e. not only experts (as is sometimes the case e.g. on Wikipedia). Each article should ideally start with a general dictionary definition and continue with a simple general explanation and overview of the topic. With more paragraphs the text can get more complex. The idea is that a noob will read the first paragraph, understand the basic idea and take something away. A more advanced reader will read further on and take away more things etc. I.e. we educate in a top-down approach.

Purpose

Basically the purpose of this wiki is to have fun and also create a coherent and consistent philosophy of a truly good software, technology and also to a related degree society.