No one should feel obligated to follow such (stylistic) conventions--it's important that we stress this lack of obligation, because one of the things that makes Wikipedia so active is precisely that people feel so free to input information in whatever format they feel comfortable with.
I think we can begin by assembling some links here to some of these existing discussions.
There probably is a better place for it, but "Manual of Style" most definitely isn't it. Or maybe it should just be linked more prominently from the homepage. "Manual of Style" means something very specific to most writers, namely, a list of editorial decisions made for a particular publication. The technical details of how two write something are, by definition, not editorial choices, they're technical requirements. --LDC
I will concede this, style is style not details. On the other hand I find lots of "HTML Style Guides" that tell you how to write HTML... --justfred
I'm sure you have, and they are mostly worthless. Anything called an "HTML Style Guide" shouldn't tell you what the tags do, it should tell you why to use certain tags for certain purposes. Believe it or not, the art of writing English prose effectively existed long before the web, and even before computers...:-)
You're right. Removed copied parts. justfred
It _is_ really close. It seems there should be a distinction made between policy and style. Let's see if I can articulate:
Articles like those in the Content and Commentary sections are more about style and less about policy. So maybe this should evolve into the pages that are about style, and point back to Policy for the articles strictly about policy?
I know I inherited this idea just by writing about it; I was trying to answer a question to myself about what style to use (well, originally I was also trying to figure out Syntax - which I think of using the [Chicago Manual of Style]? for...)
I do know I strongly believe that whatever it is we're talking about, if anywhere, should be in Wikipedia Manual of Style rather than [Wikipedia/Manual of Style]? where it was originally created. At least I think I believe that !) -justfred