LabVIEW Wiki:Manual of Style

Our Manual of style is a collection of rules of thumb and guidelines for giving LabVIEW Wiki a consistent look and feel. Most of these rules have exceptions, but to put together a good reference work collaboratively, it's best to follow the rules unless they're quite inappropriate for a particular situation.

These are not rigid laws: they are principles that many editors have found to work well in most circumstances, but which should be applied with flexibility. In this vein, editors should strive to have their articles follow these guidelines. If all this stuff makes your head swim, and you don't want to bother with it, by all means plunge forward and just start sharing your knowledge. Other LabVIEW Wiki editors will come forward (they always do) and bring your contributions in line with the style guide.

If you have a question about the specifics of the Manual, or want to see it changed/amended/clarified, use the discussion topic for the section in question. Otherwise, you can always post a comment in the LabVIEW Wiki Support Forum.

Page naming conventions

Note: If an article has been named inappropriately, it can be renamed by moving the article to a more appropriate title. See Help:Moving a page for more on renaming pages.

Lowercase second and subsequent words in titles

Convention: Do not capitalize second and subsequent words unless the title is a proper noun (such as a name) or is otherwise almost always capitalized (for example: John Wayne and Art Nouveau, but not Computer And Video Games). The first letter of an internal wikilink need not be capitalized and will direct the reader to the same page (for example, computer and video games or Computer and video games can be used interchangeably as needed).

Prefer singular nouns

Convention: In general only create page titles that are in the singular, unless that noun is always in a plural form in English (such as scissors or trousers).

Avoid "the" and "a" or "an" at the beginning of the page name

Convention: If the definite or indefinite article would be capitalized in running text, then include it at the beginning of the page name. This would be the case for the title of a work such as a novel. Otherwise, do not include it at the beginning of the page name.

Add a "See also" section

If you know of other LabVIEW Wiki articles that are related to the current article, add links to them in a special section at the bottom called "See also". This section should be placed at the bottom of the article before any "External Links" section. Only LabVIEW Wiki articles should be placed here. See below for external links.

Add an "External links" section

If you know of any external (non LabVIEW Wiki) web pages that may provide more information on the article topic, add links to them in a special section at the bottom called "External Links". This section should be placed after the "See Also" section. A typical example would be linking to the LabVIEW help documentation on ni.com.

Images

It is difficult to suggest image positioning recommendations however if in doubt, centering is preferred.

Images should always be framed.
If an image is larger than 600px wide then it should be thumbnailed at 600px.
Use captions to explain the relevance of the image to the article.
Avoid using image or figure numbers in your caption as this makes editing difficult. Inserting images will result in a large editing task for the remaining image references.
When uploading an image, add a description during the upload process. This can be longer and more detailed than the caption. This is useful when the reader clicks on the image source looking for more information.

Other specific conventions

The following words, when used in the title or body of the page must be capitalized and written as shown below.

LabVIEW - Do not use labview, LV, etc.