Wiki Editing Guidelines
Introduction
In order to maintain consistency, existing wiki standards, conventions and patterns should be followed, whether explicitly documented or not.
Any convention changes should be made across-the-board (whole wiki) at one time, rather than on an ad-hoc (page by page) basis.
Be bold, but don't trample or create work for others.
Contents
The Basics
Familiarise yourself with Wiki Syntax & Markup and Editing
Use Wiki markup wherever possible. Commonly forgotten examples:
Writing inline notes (Note: inline note), instead of <<FootNote("insert footnote")>>
Direct use of URL's (https://blahblah/url), instead of [[<url>|link text]]
Subscribe to pages you care about, or of teams and projects you are a part of. There's a link in the main menu on every page. You'll receive notifications of changes to these pages (except for [x] Trivial change's).
Avoid adding Access Control List (ACLs) wherever possible. We're aiming to reduce use of these.
Editing
When editing, don't leave the Comment field empty. This helps people understand and review changes (example: RecentChanges) without having to look at diffs.
Write a Comment like a good commit log message summary/title. Start with an action word.
Tick [x] Trivial change to disable change notifications to people subscribed to that page. Use it for minor edits only.
Get into the habit of using [Preview] for every change. You'd be surprised how often humans make editing mistakes and this reduces churn and spam.
New Pages & Content
All pages, including new pages, should always be 'complete', even in their initial version. Place drafts or "pages-in-progress" under your AccountName/ namespace until they are ready for prime time.
Attempt and prefer to obtain content review before landing new pages in the main namespace.
Page Naming
Use StandardWikiName for page titles. For acronyms (eg: LTO), use the expanded full name (LinkTimeOptimization).
Everything in the wiki is about FreeBSD, so don't include FreeBSD in the page name. There are very rare exceptions to this.
Consider what people would search for and search engine optimization when naming pages.
Prefer shorter names over longer names, without losing meaning.
Page Hierarchy
Do your best not to go more than two Levels/Deep in the page hierarchy. We are actively trying to minimise and remove pages using more than Two/Levels/Deep
Try to find an appropriate existing namespace, rather than creating a new one.
Categories
Do your best to add relevant categories to pages, but don't over-categorize (signal:noise). List of categories: CategoryCategory