Polus

This is a new style guide for Polus, in effect since 13 December 2025.

Name

Page ID

On most MediaWiki wikis, the articles' URLs include the page name but with spaces replaced with underscores. For example, the Wikipedia article titled Solar System has Solar_System in its URL.

Here on Polus, however, the name in the URL is called the page ID and is mostly lowercase and uses dashes instead of spaces, similar to normal websites. The actual title is then defined separately in the page. For example, Polus's article Solar System has solar-system in the URL.

Page IDs should:

• be entirely lowercase, unless the page name has a Bayer/Variable star designation where the letter is a single capital Latin letter
• should use dashes instead of spaces, underscores, or dots
• should not use punctuation
• should not include an article (a, an, or the)

For more specific rules regarding page IDs, see project:Page ID rules.

Title

Every page should have the {{title}} template on top, defining the page's displayed title and short description.

For example, on top of the page Hydrogen, there is:

{{title| Hydrogen | 1st and most common element }}

Titles should:

• use proper capitalization: lowercase if it's a generic idea (eg. general relativity) but capitalized if a proper noun (eg. Oberon)
• use spaces
• not use punctuation unless the punctuation mark is an inseparable part of the name
• not include an article (a, an, the)

Layout

The layout of a normal article should be as follows:

HEADER
  {{title| Title | Short description }}
  {{#coords: 06h 45m 08.917s −16d 42' 58.02" }}
  {{#infobox| bla bla }}</nowiki>

LEAD SECTION
  **Something** is a [[thing]]. Bla bla bla.
  
MAIN CONTENT

  ## Lorem ipsum
  Dolor sit amet.
 
  ### Lore M IP address sum
  Color sit amet.
 
FOOTER TEMPLATES
  {{stub}}
  {{featured}}
 
CATEGORIES
  {{cats| Category 1 | Category 2 }}

Paragraphs

Markdown does support writing one paragraph across multiple lines. When you do so, it'll automatically collapse the multiple lines into one, and put spaces in between. However, it's not recommended here, and instead, you should just put the entire paragraph on one line. One negative effect of using multiple lines in Polus' flavor of Markdown is that you can inadvertently create ordered lists.

For example:

This caused the number of numbered asteroids to go up to
500. All of this happened in the 1900s, which is surprisingly late.

Results in:

This caused the number of numbered asteroids to go up to

500. All of this happened in the 1900s, which is surprisingly late.

Here, the Markdown parser has interpreted 500. not as the end of a sentence, but the start of an ordered list beginning at #500. Therefore, the second line goes on its own block instead of connecting to the first line.

Language

Obviously, use correct English. Both informal and formal English are acceptable, but efforts should be taken to ensure that one page has a consistent level of English. What isn't tolerable is vulgar English with swear words. American English is preferred (color, not colour), but other dialects are fine.

Names and pronouns

First person and second person pronouns (I, we, you, etc.) are not recommended in encyclopedic texts except in quotes, since they sound awkward. Indefinite pronouns such as one or anyone, or the passive voice, can be used instead of using a second person pronoun.

After a person's full name has already been mentioned before in the article, you should avoid restating the full name, and instead just use the person's last name. Third person pronouns are also obviously acceptable within the same paragraph.

For example:

Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille studied the southern sky at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa between 1750 and 1754. There, he constructed an observatory, write the Coelum Australe Stelliferum, and made various measurements.
...
Apart from naming many southern constellations, Lacaille is also known for splitting Argo Navis into 3: Carina, Vela, and Puppis.

Punctuation

Stylistic choices

• It is better to use straight apostrophes (') instead of curly apostrophes (’) which are often generated by Apple's Smart Punctuation feature. The same can be said with quotation marks ("). However, Smart Punctuation is preferred by some, so this can be exempted. What cannot be exempted is the usage of backticks (`), which become code blocks in Markdown.
• The Oxford comma should be placed.
• Instead of the ampersand (&) and at sign (@), the words and and at should be used, respectively.
• Normal dashes/hyphens (-) are preferred over figure, en, or em dashes, even in situations where the special dashes are preferred in academic writing. Therefore, an em dash means someone either didn't read this or, more likely, copied the content from AI.
• Ellipses should not have spaces in them (ie. ..., not . . .).
• Colons (:) and semicolons (;) are fine as long as they are used correctly. Colons introduce a list, quote, or further explanation, while semicolons link 2 different independent clauses or act as separators in a list where the list items already have commas (aka super comma).
• The pound sign (#) is preferred for labeling a number. For example, it should be #14, not no. 14 or № 14.

Plain incorrect

• No consecutive full stops (ie. instead of .., use .), unless they are ellipses.
• Exclamation (!) and question marks (?) have almost no application in encyclopedic writing, except in spoken quotes referenced from other places.

Numbers

Metric units like meters or kilograms, as well as commonly used astronomical units like light years, are always better than American customary units, aka imperial units. Instead of writing out several unit conversions like "12.3 light years or 3.77 parsecs", you can alternatively make use of the wiki's automatic unit converter. For example, if you wrote /12.3 ly/, it would turn into 12.3 ly, which you can click to reveal converted units.

Both commas (6,942,000) and spaces (6 942 000) are acceptable for separating blocks of 3 digits in numbers, but dots aren't. Scientific notation should be used for large numbers. Here, you can use the custom scientific notation syntax: 3x10^4 becomes 3×10⁴.

Date and time

When writing dates in full form, DMY is preferred: 13 December 2025. The month can also be abbreviated, resulting in 13 Dec 2025. When writing the date with only numbers, however, YYYY/MM/DD is preferred: 2025/12/13, as this reduces ambiguity on whether the date is DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY.

Commas should not be placed in year numbers: 2026, not 2,026 (wtf). AD and CE generally shouldn't be used for years 1000 and later.

Formatting

Text formatting

• Bold text is generally used only for the title in the lead section, but can also be used to emphasize text, though it should be used only sparingly in the latter case.
• Italic text can be used for mentions of names. For quotations, quotation marks are preferred.
• Underlined text can be used to point out the letters that compose an abbreviation. For example: "NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Ndministration)". Otherwise, bold text is preferred for emphasis.

Links

It's important to note that links to other Polus pages should include the page ID, not the title, as the reference. It's [[ceres]], not [[Ceres]] (this won't work).

Interwiki exists. You should use [[wp:Car|Car]] over [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car Car], since the former is clearly way more concise.

Syntax style

Spaces should be placed between different markdown elements to improve readability, although this has become slightly less relevant due to the introduction of the visual editor, where more of the raw markdown is hidden.

For example, this:

{{infobox
 | name = Name
 | type = Type
}}

## Heading

- List item 1
- List item 2

{{template| argument 1 | argument 2 }}

is better than:

{{infobox|name=Name|type=Type}}
##Heading
- List item 1
- List item 2
{{template|argument 1|argument 2}}

(ew!)