Style Guide

The Guidelines

We want our pages to be very easy to read, even on tiny screens or in low light. We also want our pages to be easy to write. So, if you're trying to make a page look cleaner, observe these guidelines:

• Presenting things as whole sentences, in lists or paragraphs, is often the best choice.
• Links to key concepts or context are profoundly and surprisingly useful - especially in a wiki like this.
• Headers, as chosen from the styles dropdown, are great.
• Use bold or italics sparingly. When many words are emphasized, none really stand out, and the page looks worse overall.
• Use tables for tabular data, but not for general page layout. In general, don't attempt fancy page layouts, just write documents top to bottom! (This will be more consistent across all pages, be easier for others to edit in the future, and work when people want to read on a tiny screen.)

But Don't Worry About the Guidelines

All that said, if you're writing information on this site at all, and you hope for it to be useful to Nylanders later, then:

• You are doing great
• That is awesome, thank you
• Don't stress about formatting.

I've conjured up these guidelines as if they're very strict, but if you write something down that someone else might use later, then you are winning at the wiki game. That's the whole point.

These guidelines are just here if you're inclined to sweat these sorts of details, and if that makes you want a "proper style" of some sort. As such, this guide is intended to be directional but not prescriptive -- so, if someone edits just the styling on some page, let's view it as constructive if it brings the page closer to these guidelines, and let's view it as destructive if it takes the page further away from these guidelines.

Again, don't sweat it. The point of a page is not its styling, the point of a page is the knowledge it collects, represents, and preserves.