User:Qqwref/Spelling and Grammar

These are a couple issues with spelling and grammar that I'd like to address. These are just my personal ideas, but if you want to discuss them go ahead and use the talk page.

American or British?

Regrettably in English there are two acceptable ways to spell certain words (color/colour, for example). Some of you may have specific preferences based on your home country. I would like to suggest that we always use the American spelling in this wiki. It is a simple fact that the U.S. has way more cubers than the U.K., as well as a much bigger cubing community. The American spellings are simply more accessible to the users.

Spell Check

As you type your article you should notice that sometimes words have a little red squiggly line under them. That's spell check. Unless the word is a cubing term or a name, that means it's spelled wrong, and if this is in an article you should do your best to put the correct spelling there so that someone else doesn't have to fix it later. There are not very many editors working on these pages so if you make an error it may be up for quite a while.

Formality

I know this isn't a formal, important wiki or anything like that, but I'd appreciate it if you used formal English in the articles. Please try to avoid slang (especially slang that people from other countries wouldn't understand!) and don't use smileys or say things like "I think" in articles. (If you're unsure of something, either look it up yourself, or write it on the talk page, and perhaps the next person who edits the page will check it out.) If we can make this site look authoritative rather than something that a couple of people hacked together, we will get much more traffic and many more contributions.

Formatting

This isn't the grammar of English, but the grammar of Wikipedia :D Formatting is very important because a badly formatted article just looks bad. There are a few things to note here:

• Lists. You can make a list with either * (which will make a bulleted list) or : (which will make a list without bullets). These can be nested - for example you can use ** to make a list two elements deep. Sometimes lists are very useful to organize a group of steps or algorithms so that you don't have to put each in a separate paragraph. Don't overuse the * list - seeing too many bullets is annoying if there are a lot of things in the list. Sometimes : is useful to just indent things.
• Introductions. If you are doing a long article, you should start off with an introduction of a few sentences or less (like there is here), which goes before any headings. All the introduction does is describe what the page is about or why it's there, but it is important to have in case you expect people to read your page.
• Images. Before you upload an image try to make sure the aspect ratio is good (that is, it doesn't appear squished). This will make it look good on any articles it is put in.