Tutorial/Encyclopedic writing
While you are free and encouraged to make pages however you so please, a crowd-pleasing genre of articles are those that resemble the contents of Wikipedia. These employ encyclopedic writing to create the appearance. As you are likely to already be familiar with what a Wikipedia article looks like, this may come as second nature, though some pointers may be helpful.
Tone
Encyclopedic writing aims for a neutral, informative, and formal tone. This can be subverted for the sake of a joke, and the contents of the text in this tone need not be factual.
Grammar
Proper sentence structure, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling are valuable tools in encyclopedic writing. Typos exist even on Wikipedia, of course, but it always helps to give your writing a good proofreading.
Formatting
Wiki articles typically use sentence case for titles and headings ("History of dog food" (sentence case) vs "History of Dog Food" (title case)), though the lines are blurred when making articles about objects or singular events ("Red berry" vs "Red Berry" may be up to you).
Most people expect at least one image per page, often at the start of an article, and with a caption. Certain templates, such as quotes, infoboxes, navboxes, and headers, as well as in-line templates such as "citation needed" also add helpful shaping to your page. You can also supplement statements with references or notes using <ref>.
Links are one of the most iconic features of online encyclopedias. They offer paths forward for browsing the wiki, they add color to your text, they can be prompts for you or others to make new articles, and they can be used effectively as gags. You should not be averse to adding "red links" (links to pages that do not yet exist), though you may find a good balance between red and blue links.
It is recommended to add categories to articles you create. These can be broad or specific, and you can create new ones as you please (though it is preferable to avoid creating slight variations of existing categories (eg. "Flower" vs "Flowers", and note that all pages and categories are case-sensitive)). Categories help mark the end of a page, offer links to other pages for convenient browsing, and can be an easy gag in its own right for the category page itself.
 |
English Wikipedia has an article on:
|