sona pona:Guide

This is a wiki essay with advice from one or more contributors.

Welcome, aspiring editor! This work-in-progress guide will hopefully help you get your bearings on the wiki.

What do I do here?

Any help is welcome—you can even just fix typos—but there are many larger projects you may like to participate in:

• Creating requested pages, or articles for other things that you know about
• Writing and expanding word articles
• Expanding lists of media
• Writing essays
• Adding missing information, especially to articles marked as needing work
• Adding sources to articles, especially in articles with the {{citation needed}} template
• Fixing formatting, especially in unadapted imported pages
• And many more projects tracked in the #pali forum thread on the Discord server

Technical

Moderation

Your first edit won't appear immediately and will instead be sent to the moderators for approval. This is to prevent trolls from making new accounts purely to grief the wiki.

Policy

Be bold

See also the Wikipedia policy.

If you have an idea for an edit or page, but you're not sure whether others will like it, just do it! Everyone can easily bring a page back to a previous version, so it's impossible to permanently "ruin" anything. Patrolling ensures that every edit will be inspected by at least one other person.

Be messy

See also the MS Paint Adventures Wiki policy and the talk page for this article.

An unfinished or messy page is infinitely better than no page at all. Even if you never come back to it, someone else surely will. Slap a {{Needs work}} template on top and let others work their magic.

(But as a corollary, do make the page however good you can, so that others can work off of it as easily as possible.)

Notability

See Project:Notability.

Source what you can

Main page: Project:Citing sources

It might be difficult to find sources, so just source what you can (if anything)! Primary sources are fine. For general information, we have lists of common resources and citation templates to use.

If you cite anything, please archive it! Links to Discord uploads are temporary, and so must be archived.

Details and organization

There are some useful rules of thumb for coming up with details to include, and deciding how to organize them.

• Inverted pyramid style: Give important info and "conclusions" first. For example, explain common styles and prototypical usages before experiments.
• Five Ws (and H): The details "who, what, when, where, why, how" are important background information. If these are missing, you can tag the sentence with {{wh|who?}} or similar.
• Follow established layouts: You can check articles on similar topics to see how they're laid out and what details they tend to include. (Not a hard rule; some articles do call for unique section headings.)
• No trivia sections. This has a few prongs:
  • Put new facts in relevant sections. The lead section counts! If no section fits yet, you can add one—just make it specific. The heading can be any noun phrase, after all.
  • No lists of miscellaneous information. These grow rampant and disorganized into walls of contradictory points, where even general info becomes impossible for the reader to find.
  • Something literally trivial ("of little value") need not be on a wiki. (But many "trivia" points sell themselves short, and would be useful if better placed!)

Red links are not bad

See also Wikipedia:Red link.

Red links point to wanted pages that don't exist yet. This is good:

• It shows gaps in our knowledge base.
• It helps us keep track of pages to create. (See Special:WantedPages.)
• It prevents pages from starting out orphaned.

Don't remove red links just for being red links. Only remove one if it wouldn't be reasonable to create a page at that title. (And remember that a page can be a redirect or a disambiguation page.)

Trans rights

Formatting

In addition to standard MediaWiki formatting, note the following.

Italics

Mark emphasized text with <em>emphasized text</em>.

Mark Toki Pona text with Template:tp. For other languages, see the next section.

{{tp|mu}} outputs mu.

Mark variables with <var>variable name</var>.

For other uses, you can use ''italic text''.

Language

Mark the language of non-English text with Template:lang.

This lets technologies like screen readers treat the text according to its language (see ISO 639-3).

''{{lang|fr|je parle bien}}'' outputs je parle bien. Hover to see the language name.

Mark unitalicized Toki Pona text with Template:tok.

Italics usually help the reader distinguish between English and Toki Pona text (such as reading "open a tan ale" and "open a tan ale" with different pronunciations). However, they may be unwanted for names loaned from Toki Pona, direct quotes of unitalicized uses, or for toki pona taso pages.

{{tok|mu}} outputs mu.

Mark text in the International Phonetic Alphabet with Template:IPA.

Titles

Mark a page title as italic or Toki Pona text using Template:Italic title, Template:tp title, or Template:tok title according to the guidance above.

sitelen pona

Display sitelen Lasina or UCSUR codepoints as sitelen pona with Template:sp.

{{sp|mu}} outputs mumu. Hover or press to see the sitelen Lasina input.

Links

Use Template:w to link to a Wikipedia article, and Template:wikt to link to a Wiktionary entry.

Indentation

Indent with Template:Indent.

Using the : (description detail) syntax without a preceding ; (description term) produces invalid HTML, which is not accessible.

For a hatnote, use Template:Hatnote or a template derived from it.

Examples

Use Template:Example for all example sentences. Highlight the part of the sentence that is relevant to the article or section with <mark>highlighted text</mark>.

Citations

See Project:Citing sources § Formatting.

Notice templates

There are several notice templates that should be used to tell the reader about the nature of an article's topic, such as if it pertains to an unusual style of Toki Pona. We don't want to mispresent nonstandard features as common if they aren't widely understood or accepted.

Maintenance templates

If you find an issue with an article and can't fix it yourself, or not immediately, add a maintenance template. These include:

• Template:citation needed
• Template:dead link
• All templates derived from Template:Issue

Remove a maintenance template once the issue is resolved. There may also be cases where you should change one maintenance template to another, such as Template:Stub or Template:Empty to Template:Needs work.

If you're looking for something to do, you can check Category:Maintenance for issues to fix!

Conventional flexibility

Use Template:, (comma) to insert an optionally displayed serial comma. However, see the guidance in Wikipedia's Manual of Style to make sure the text makes sense with and without the comma.

Use Template:date to format a date according to the reader's preference. This need only be used for dates with multiple parts that are ordered in different ways by different conventions.

Layouts

Word articles

See Project:Word articles.