Esperanto/Manual of style

In order to get a consistent look-and-feel throughout the Esperanto Wikibook, I ask that when you make changes, you try to conform to this manual of style.

This manual of style is not intended to override or replace the Wikibooks manual of style. It is a local manual of style specific to the Esperanto wikibook. It provides style guidelines valid only within that book.

General

Don't fret about style.

If you have content to add, just add it. Others will edit your contributions so that it fits with the rest of the book's overall style.

Or, if you want to help but have no content to add, help out by trying to bring what's there up to the same standard as the rest of the book.

Use discussion pages.

If you want to make big changes, or are unsure about whether something is an error or not, don't be afraid to bring it up on the page's discussion page.

Use maintenance templates where appropriate.

Maintenance templates provide a handy way to mark up problems in the book.

Don't overdo it, of course.

Prefer to fix the problem, rather than marking it up.

Be bold.

If you see obvious errors, please fix them. Minor changes, especially fixes, don't need discussion.

Useful templates

Tip

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When you use or see a {{todo}} note that you might want to fix later, you can add your username to the end like {{todo|TODO message|Esperanto|<your username>}}. This creates a category "Category:TODO/<your username>" that you can use to keep track of TODO notes you are interested in.

{{todo}}

If you see something wrong or missing that you cannot immediately fix, please mark it up with {{todo|<TODO message>|Esperanto}}, and use a clear TODO message.

If you are looking for something to fix, you can check Category:TODO/Esperanto to see every page in the book that has TODO notes on it.

Titles

Titles should be in English.

As much as it might be nice to encourage reading Esperanto words as much as possible, the target audience for this book is English speakers who are probably not all that great with Esperanto.

Searching will probably be done using English search terms (who is going to search English Wikibooks for "Esperanto vortkonstruado" rather than "Esperanto word synthesis"?).

Beginners to Esperanto will have a hard time with much of the spelling (ask a beginner to spell komencanto quickly off the top of their head, and they will probably get it wrong), making it difficult for people to enter page titles manually.

Titles should use sentence case ("This is a page title" rather than "This Is A Page Title" or "This is a Page Title").

This is trivially easy to keep consistent across the book. If you use title-casing, would you use "This is a Page Title" or "This Is a Page Title"? Different people give different answers. But sentence-casing is universal.

It is easier to wikilink to, because sentence-casing is universal.

It matches the wiki standard used in Wikipedia and other wikis (because it makes wikilinking easier).

It also matches the Esperanto standard.

The only drawback is that it doesn't match traditional English print standard, but this is a different technology, and some concessions must be made.

Titles should be descriptive ("Alphabet and pronunciation", not "Appendix A").

The reasons for this should be self-evident.

It allows for trivially easy shuffling around of chapters and sections.

Text

Mark up Esperanto text with the {{lang eo}} template.

This template marks up the text given so that it is recognized by user's browsers as Esperanto.

It also highlights the text (by making it italic) so it can be visually recognized by readers.

Use tables to format tabular information.

Don't use preformatted text for this purpose.