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?

This section needs work:

WIP

If you know about this topic, you can help us by editing it. (See all)

• even just fix typos
• sources
• formatting
• media
• make requested pages or ones you know about
• write essays

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.

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.

Source what you can

Unlike topics covered by Wikipedia, there aren't many public reliable sources for Toki Pona. (In fact, this very wiki was made to fill that gap!) As such, it's fine if an article doesn't have any citations, though they're always appreciated (and encouraged for lipu pona status).

There are many citation templates for different media, sites, and even specific sources that are frequently cited.

Potential resources include:

• The Official Toki Pona books (pu and ku), if you have them
  • Freely available sections, such as the pu dictionary, or ku's "Notes on lipu pu" section
• Other materials by jan Sonja, e.g. the tokiponization guidelines
• Other source texts on the wiki
• lipu Linku
• Anything listed on the Recommended learning resources article
• The Toki Pona census

When using a proficient speaker's thoughts as a source, remember to note whether they reflect consensus or are rather their personal nasin. This includes what you may consider "official" material:

This is the way I use Toki Pona.

—pu, p. 7

Resources with open submissions, such as Tatoeba and Glosbe, often attract overconfident beginners and so should be treated with care.

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

Please use Template:Example for all example sentences, and <mark> the part of the sentence that is relevant to the article or section.

Citations

Please put citations in <ref> tags using the Cite package. Each page should end with a references section. Most sources will probably be cited with Template:cite web. There are also specialized templates like Template:cite pu, Template:cite ku, Template:cite YouTube, Template:cite Discord, and Template:cite lipamanka (for lipamanka's semantic space dictionary).

Please consider archiving a source with the Wayback Machine or archive.is. This is especially necessary for Discord uploads; unarchived links will start to expire so that the files can only be accessed through Discord.

You can add a JavaScript bookmarklet to quickly archive a webpage to the Wayback Machine. Create a bookmark and set this as the "URL":

javascript:void(location.href='https://web.archive.org/save/'+location.href);

Then, whenever you press the bookmarklet, a snapshot of the currently viewed webpage will be saved.

Notice templates

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
• 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!

Layouts

Word articles

See Project:Word articles.