Linguocrankery:Writing guidelines

If you're going to fight pseudoscience, you might as well do it in style. You'll fail, but at least folks will remember how cool you looked. This Manual of Style (MoS) should help you do just that: make articles here cool, consistent, convincing.

You are also encouraged to study and follow Wikipedia's excellent. It's extremely comprehensive and has been refined over decades. Everything in Linguocrankery's MoS deals with aspects of style that are either in conflict with or are not covered by Wikipedia; there's no point in reinventing the wheel.

Integration with Wikipedia
Linguocrankery is a specialised wiki, but one that by its nature can touch a lot of topics. For this reason, it's best that you neither create dozens of articles that don't really fit the purpose of the wiki, nor leave the poor reader in the dark. Just leech off the big guy. You can create a special green-coloured link to a Wikipedia page through.

Some (but not all) good reasons to do so:


 * Mention of a linguistic term or topic that is not relevant enough to linguocrankery to merit an article. There's no point in having an article on here, but if they do come up, it's best to direct the reader to Wikipedia where they can find out more.
 * Mention of a person, place or organisation that the reader is unlikely to know about. However, obscurity alone does not justify a link. The information on the other side of the link should add to the article.
 * Jokes. You can use Wikipedia links to an amusing effect. I'll leave it up to you to figure out how.

A reader might by interested in a more "impartial" and sometimes more detailed overview. If any article here has a corresponding one on Wikipedia (not necessarily with the same title, use common sense), add the wikihat template on top:. Follow the template hierarchy.

Pay attention to the ratio of links. If there are more green links than blue ones, or at the very least blue and red ones together, you are probably overdoing it.