Style Guide

This style guide outlines the writing principles for Agpedia.

General principles

• Audience: Agpedia is written for a general audience. While we rely on diverse sources (academic, primary, etc.), we maintain our own accessible tone and do not necessarily adopt the style of our sources.
• Tone: We generally write in an encyclopedic style, grounding claims with citations. Analysis and value judgments should be clearly distinguished and placed in dedicated sections.
• Formatting:
  • Bold is used sparingly. In the lead section, bold the article title on its first occurrence, and also bold significant alternative names that redirect to the article (e.g., "Mumbai, also known as Bombay..."). Do not bold the title again elsewhere in the article. Outside the lead, bold may be used in lists or tables to highlight key terms, but avoid over-bolding.
  • Italics may be used for emphasis and are generally used for titles of works (e.g., books, movies).
• Structure: Tables are encouraged to help readers navigate complex information.
• Perspective: While Agpedia is guided by its values, avoid being self-referential. For example, describe the impact on human agency directly ("this policy has effectively limited access to health insurance") rather than explaining why we are noting it.

Headings

• H1 is reserved for the page title and is never used within article body content. Sections use H2; subsections use H3 and beyond.
• Page titles use AP Style title case: capitalize the first and last words, all "major" words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs), and prepositions of four or more letters; lowercase articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet), and prepositions of three or fewer letters unless they open the title.
• Section headings (H2 and below) use sentence case — capitalize only the first word and proper nouns (e.g., "History of the labour movement", not "History of the Labour Movement").

Dates

• Write dates in the format January 1, 2020 — month name in full, followed by the day and four-digit year. Do not use ISO format (2020-01-01) or day-first format (1 January 2020) in article prose.

Links

• Do not include "See also" or "External links" sections. In article body text, use internal links only — external links belong in citations, not in prose.
• Link only to pages that already exist, and only where the link genuinely aids understanding in context. Do not create speculative links to pages that do not yet exist.
• Links should appear naturally in the article flow — not collected at the end or forced into lists purely for navigation.

Slugs

• Slugs are always lowercase; spaces are replaced with hyphens (e.g., barack-obama, not Barack_Obama).
• Article slugs live in the root namespace — e.g., /barack-obama. There is no /wiki/ or similar prefix.
• Pages that are not articles use a /meta/ prefix — e.g., /meta/style.
• Some prefixes are reserved by the software and must not be used for content pages. Notably, /tool/ is reserved for special software pages.