User:Sethmahoney/Philosophy standards

This is a proposed standard for the layout and use of color in tables, templates, images, and large quotes in Wikipedia philosophy articles. The goal is to give philosophy articles a similar appearance in order to aid navigation and lend the appearance of a more unified whole to the various Wikipedia articles. Another way to phrase this might be to say that the goal here should be to make the philosophy articles as a set look more like a single book and less like a collection of web pages cobbled together.

Among the proposals on this page you will find a proposed color scheme. The following colors should be used in all tables, charts, and templates:

Default background color: #F4F4FC Header/title color: #EAEAFC Hilighted item color: #FCFCF2

Typographical elements
The default font should never be changed, though within tables or templates the font size may be reduced.

Commas
Except in quotations where it does not appear in the original, the Oxford comma should be used in all lists of items to avoid ambiguity.

Do:

I need to buy milk, eggs, flour, and sugar.

Don't:

I need to buy milk, eggs, flour and sugar.

Italics
Use of italics should be restricted to that described in Manual of Style. Quotations should never appear in italics, unless the original quote appears italicized, or unless emphasis is added by the article editor (in which case this should be noted after the quote).

Bold face
Text should never be manually bolded. The only word in an article which appear in bold face should be the first occurance of the article title, which should appear in the first or second sentence of the article.

Quotes
Short quotes should be contained within the text, within quotation marks. Long quotes (more than a sentence) should be offset from the text using the quotation tag:. This looks like so:

Quotations should always be attributed to a specific person, with a reference to the book it appears in, where applicable.

With the exception of ellipses, punctuation should not be added within quotations when it does not appear in the original quotation.

If the quote is:

"They could mean an instance of rabbitness or any number of other things."

Do:

"They could mean an instance of rabbitness", Quine insists.

Don't:

"They could mean an instance of rabbitness," Quine insists.

Tables
For more information on the use of tables in Wikipedia, see: How to use tables.

Tables should be placed so that they do not break the flow of text (usually this means right-aligning them), except when used as an illustrative device within the text, in which case there should be a line break before and after the table.

Templates
Templates that contain tables should follow the guidelines above. Templates, generally, should not contain charts. If a template contains an image, it should be mid- to low-contrast grayscale, to avoid drawing significant attention to it.

Templates should always be aligned on the right-hand side of the page, or along the bottom, except when the template is small (see the philosophy portal template for an example).

Most of these guidelines do not apply to templates whose purpose is to introduce an article. See Bertrand Russell for an example.

Images
For images relating to philosophy topics, see:
 * Category:Philosophy images
 * Category:Images of philosophers
 * Category:Images of philosophy books

Images should be clear and easy to make out, not fuzzy or pixellated. They should be appropriately sized relative to the paragraph to which they are attached.

Charts
Charts which are made by Wikipedians and included in articles as images should generally try to use the color scheme outlined above. A good balance between readability and non-intrusiveness should be attempted. As with other images, charts should not appear pixellated or fuzzy.

Placement
For instructions on how to place an image in a Wikipedia article, see Picture tutorial.

Captions
See Captions.