Help:Style guidelines

To maintain a cohesive wiki, please stick to the style guidelines where possible. Though don't let that put you off — feel free to just add and edit articles as you like, and other people will likely tidy up the formatting later on.

This guide will you a brief overview of the formatting options available. If you want to know more about how linking pages to other pages works, this guide has all the info.

Point of view

We especially encourage articles informed by lived experience, and recognise that "objectivity" doesn't mean reinforcing the outgroup's status quo.

It's also safe to assume the reader is autistic, although they may only recently have discovered this fact. They may not yet know all the terminology, but they're happy to follow the links to learn more. This wiki is primarily by autistic people, for autistic people, although others are welcome to contribute.

We especially encourage a neurodiversity-affirming approach that suggests all neurotypes are equally valid, while simultaneously acknowledging that being neurodivergent in a neuro-typical society can be disabling.

Page titles

Where possible, page titles should only have their first word capitalised. "Like this", "Not Like This". The exception is if the page is about something that is usually capitalised, such as a book.

Titles should be singular, not plural, where it makes sense to do so. For example, "Sense" instead of "Senses".

Bold and italic text

You can make text bold with

'''three apostrophes'''

or italic with

''two apostrophes''.

The more encyclopedic-oriented pages should start off with a brief description or definition of the main subject. Try to incorporate the page title, or relevant parts of it, in a short introductory paragraph, and format the first instance of the main subject as bold text. For example, the page on Autism could start off with:

Autism is a neurotype ...

Sections and subsections

For longer pages it is often a good idea to use multiple sections to separate the text into different, visually distinct parts. It improves both readability as well as skimmability. You're currently reading the section Sections and subsections.

If you get the feeling that a single section might contain too much text, try thinking about moving parts of it to another new section entirely, or splitting the section into multiple smaller subsections:

Example 1

Just like this.

Example 2

And like this.

The first few sentences or paragraphs of a page should not be contained under a section, however.

Adding references

To add a reference, type

<ref>[http://www.example.com/ An Example Webpage]</ref>

where http://www.example.com/ is a link to a webpage, and An Example Webpage is its title. This will result in a small number superscript where you typed, and the link appearing at the bottom of the page, like this.

Meta text and editorial notes

Someday we might use the wikimedia Talk page, but for now we're having editorial discussions in the page itself. Make them easy to see by setting them off in a pink box. Wrap your note in a styled <blockquote> tag, like so:

  <blockquote style="background-color: pink">
  Needs more citations.
  </blockquote>

That will show up on the page something like this:

Needs more citations.

Feel free to add four tildes ~~~~ at the end of your comment which will automatically be converted to your username along with a timestamp. You don't have to if you don't want to though!

Content notes

You can add content notes at the top of a page or a section to notify readers about certain things before they read the actual text.

If you type {{Content Warning}} it will show up as

Content warning: difficult topics. This might get uncomfortable. Remember you always have the option to stop reading if it gets overwhelming.

If you type {{Stub}} it will show up as

This page or section is a stub. Perhaps you can help add something to it? 😊