Help:Introduction to the Manual of Style/1

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We're working on shortening the MoS ... really.

The Manual of Style, sometimes abbreviated as MoS, is a long guide that provides standards on how to format written Wikipedia articles. Because there are so many articles out there, it is important to follow it as a guideline as best you can; this is so that your contribution can remain clear, consistent and stable. The simplest way to do this is just to find a well written article and copy its formatting.

This introduction provides a light gloss of some of the most important features of the Manual of Style that will help in getting you around.

Example of good wiki linking.

Links

Linking through hyperlinks is an important feature of Wikipedia. While external links help to embed Wikipedia into the external World Wide Web, internal links (or 'wiki links') bind the project together into an interconnected whole. Links provide instant pathways to locations outside and within the project that are likely to increase our readers' understanding of the topic at hand.


For how many internal links to include in an article, you want to ask yourself, "How likely is it that a reader of this subject may be interested in that other article, or does it cover a concept not fully explained in the article?"

Lennie and George came to a ranch near [[Soledad, California|Soledad]] southeast of [[Salinas, California]], to "work up a stake".

When saved, this produces:

Lennie and George came to a ranch near Soledad southeast of Salinas, California, to "work up a stake".

For external links, if there is an external website that is highly relevant to the article or provides more detail than the article contains, it should be listed in the 'External links' section with a short description. If an external website is used as a reference to the article's content, put it in the 'References' section. External links, with rare exception, should not be used in the article's body text.

User:Tony1/Build_your_linking_skills


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