Culture.si:Manual of Style (MOS)

Maintained by Jana Wilcoxen --jwilcoxen 11:01, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

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This Manual of Style, often abbreviated MoS or MOS, is a Style guide for Culture.si articles. This main page contains basic principles.

If the Manual of Style does not specify a preferred usage, please discuss the issue on the talk page.

General principles

Follow the sources

Many points of usage, such as the treatment of proper names, can be decided by seeing what other writers do about the problem. Unless there is some clear reason to do otherwise, it is generally a good idea to follow the usage of reliable secondary sources in English on the subject; the sources for the article itself should be reliable. If the sources for the article can be shown to be unrepresentative of current English usage as a whole, follow current English usage instead — and discuss it on the talk page. Stay tuned for a list of preferred sources.

Article titles, headings, and sections

These rules apply to the titles of Culture.si articles, not to the titles of external articles that are cited.

Article titles

• In general, article titles should be the English name of the organisation under discussion. The following article titles are the exceptions to this rule:
  • Names of the following organisations:
  • Names of the following types of organisations:
  • Names of magazines, exhibitions, festivals should be titled as: Ampak Magazine, HAIP Festival
  • Articles which are meant as introductions to the field or historical overviews of the field in Slovenia.
• For venues use a comma like this: Cankarjev dom, Kosovel Hall
• This wiki is case sensitive: KIBLA / Kibla, ŠKUC / Škuc ... please, check the official case!
• The initial letter of a title is capitalised (except in very rare cases, such as eBay). Otherwise, use Sentence case, that is, use capital letters only where they would be used in a normal sentence Funding of UNESCO projects, not Funding of UNESCO Projects). --> Actually, not sure. Maybe regular Title Case would be better, not Sentence case.
• A, an, and the are normally avoided as the first word (Economy of the Second Empire, not The economy of the Second Empire), unless part of a proper noun (The Hague).
• Article titles should conform to Culture.si’s Naming conventions.
• Titles are generally nouns or noun phrases (Effects of the wild, not About the effects of the wild).
• Special characters—such as the slash (/), plus sign (+), braces ({ }), and square brackets ([ ])— are avoided; the ampersand (&) is replaced by and, unless it is part of a formal name (Emerson, Lake & Palmer).
• The final visible character of a title should not be a punctuation mark, unless the punctuation is part of a proper name, an abbreviation or acronym is used with punctuation or a closing parenthesis or quote is needed (Architects' Bulletin (ab)).

This guidance also applies to Section headings, below.

Body

• apply translations like this: Pekarna (in English: bakery)??? -> Pekarna Cultural Centre
• decades: 80s, 90s

Usage

Dates and calendar items

• Months, days of the week, and holidays start with a capital letter: June, Monday, the Fourth of July (when referring to the U.S. Independence Day, otherwise 4 July).
• Seasons, in almost all instances, are lowercase: This summer was very hot; The winter solstice occurs about 22 December; I have spring fever. When personified, season names may function as proper nouns, and they should then be capitalized: I think Spring is showing her colors; Old Man Winter.
• When mentioning a specific date write it as 1 January 2009, not as 1st January, January 1, or January the 1st.

Directions and regions

• Directions such as north are not proper nouns and do not take capitals. The same is true for their related forms: someone might call a road that leads north a northern road, compared with the Great North Road. Composite directions should be hyphenated in British English: South-East Asia and north-west.
• Regions that are proper nouns, including widely known expressions such as Eastern Europe, start with a capital letter. Similarly, a person from the Southern United States is a Southerner. If uncertain whether to capitalise, do not.