GoodWikiStyle - MusicBrainz Wiki

Some people new to Wiki may not know where to begin. This will hopefully be a help to those who are completely new to Wiki and for those who just need a reference. The majority of this information was compiled by DonRedman; I have done some restructing of his original content. --WolfSong

General Information

The WikiWikiWeb is the first Wiki ever. It has a lot of information about WikiNature and WikiStyle. It contains a few suggestions on how to be a GoodWikiCitizen. Other "old" (as in older than Wikipedia) wikis are UseModWiki and MeatballWiki. If you want to become familiar with Wikis, I suggest you take a look at these excellent Wikis and learn from them (as I did :-)). --DonRedman

Good Wiki Style

Here comes a random compilation of tips and rules that I gathered from the above resources --DonRedman

Sign Your Edits

A good Wikizen signs her edits with her WikiName. --DonRedman

She then creates the page of her name. Now everybody can back-link to her edits by clicking on the title of her page (Go check it out on DonRedman's page!).

You can sign your edits by typing "@SIG@", which becomes -- MartinRudat 2006-06-15 13:59:05

Thread Mode

If discussions are still hot it is probably best to stay in ThreadMode. Threaded discussions are helpful to develop ideas, but lengthy and sometimes difficult to read later.

MoinMoin offers nice indentations
- A feature UseMod (our old wiki engine) did not have.
So please indent your comments properly and keep the flow of the thread intact.

If a page describes SomeFeature, it is often better to create a page SomeFeatureDiscussion and discuss things there. Often authors put a section "Discussion" at the bottom of their page. Please respect that.

When the discussion cools down a bit and consensus (or dissensus) begins to form, you could try to write up a tentative summary:

Tentative Summary

If a page is a mess you could write a TentativeSummary and put it (labelled as such) on the top or the bottom of that page. A good style for this is ThereforeBut.

Links to further Resources:

Good Wiki Names

WikiNames are the addresses of wiki pages. It is therefore quite essential that new pages get a good wiki name. Otherwise they will never get referenced. I have gathered some hints on how to make GoodWikiNames, and what are BadWikiNames. Also you will find some helpful background-philosophy on the page about WikiNames.

Anchors Are Bad

Dupuy and DonRedman had some arguments about this. The bottom line is that anchors in pages are useful if they are used for navigation within that page only.

If, however, you start to link to anchors on another page, then this is a very strong indicator that that page should be split. The unit of reference should always be the single page. So, if the thing in question

can be referenced by a WikiName by itself or
does not need to be referenced outside the context of that page

then and only then anchors do no harm.

Fortunately MoinMoin discourages the use of anchors for external referencing, since a link like WikiName#anchor does not work.

CategoryWiki Authors: DonRedman, WolfSong, Dupuy