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, typically in lists or tables to highlight key terms. Do not bold the first occurrence of the topic name in an article.
  • 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.