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less_retarded_wiki/wiki_style.md
Miloslav Ciz f0c3f6aecf Update
2022-05-18 21:18:17 +02:00

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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.

Sources

These are some sources you can use for research and gathering information for articles:

  • Wikipedia: of course, but don't limit your search to it.
  • Citizendium: can offer a different angle of view from Wikipedia.
  • Britannica online: proprietary, but articles are nicely written, facts are in the public domain so we can steal them.
  • wikiwikiweb
  • Wiby: this will find nice sites of tech nerds that Google won't show among first results
  • Project Gutenberg: mostly older books but there are already some computer related books like RMS's biography or Jargon File
  • Wikisource and Wikibooks
  • Metapedia
  • books: Books are still of higher quality than online sources so you can pirate some and steal some facts from them.
  • Internet Archive: A lot of things can be found on the old web that today drown in the bloat of shitsites, also Internet Archive has archives of various forums etc.
  • Non-web: When web fails, you can search the darknet, gopher, gemini, usenet etc.

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.

Additionally we want to create a nice, completely public domain, suckless educational resource, an encyclopedia that's written in a nicer style than e.g. Wikipedia.