Agentpedia:Manual of Style

The Manual of Style is the style manual for all Agentpedia articles. To summarize the whole thing: No bias and try your best to have good grammar.

Grammar

Capital letters

Acronyms

All acronyms must be written with capital letters (such as TMAFE, PNG, USA). Do not write them as a generic word, such as writing TMAFE as Tmafe.

All capitals and small capitals

Avoid writing sentences using all caps or all small caps. Sentences must be properly structured and cannot be "THIS IS A TEST SENTENCE ON AN ARTICLE" or "this is a test sentence on an article". A properly structured would be "This is a test sentence on an article."

Calendar items

It is required to capitalize the names of months, days, and holidays. Some examples include: Monday, January, Christmas, Fourth of July, June. Seasons are are to remain uncapitalized unless at the beginning of a sentence (such as "It is expected to spring soon").

Capitalization of "The"

Capitalization of the word "The" should be done only be done if its part of official name of the entity you are writing about. A proper use case of a capital "The" would be "The Microsoft Agent Frontier Empire", where "The" is included in the name. If "The" is not included is not included in the name or the sentence doesn't begin with the word "the", then don't capitalize it.

Initial letter in sentences and list items

All sentences and list items must begin with a capital letter. This doesn't apply if a letter is left uncapitalized (such as "eBay"), though it is preferable to recast the sentence.

Initial word at beginning of article

For the word that describes the article, the initial word should always be bolded. For example: Genie is a Microsoft Agent character released by Microsoft Corporation.

Punctuation

Apostrophes

Use straight apostrophes ('), not curly apostrophes (’). Do not use accent marks or backticks (`) as apostrophes.

Quotation marks

Use regular quotation marks (") and not curly (”) quotation marks. This also applies to single apostrophe quotes.

Brackets and parentheses

If a sentence contains a bracketed phrase, place the sentence punctuation outside the brackets (as shown here). However, where one or more sentences are wholly inside brackets, place their punctuation inside the brackets. The order of brackets and parentheses is "([ ])".

Commas

A pair of commas can bracket an appositive (as can brackets or dashes, though with greater interruption of the sentence). This rule will always apply unless another punctuation mark takes the place of the second comma.

Colons

A colon (:) introduces something which demonstrates, explains, or modifies what has come before, or is a list of items that has just been introduced. The items in such a list may be separated by commas; or, if they are more complex and perhaps themselves contain commas, the items should be separated by semicolons or arranged in a bulleted list.

Numbers

Numbers one through ten must be spelled out if they are referring to the amount of something (such as "there are ten examples").

Semicolons

A semicolon (;) is sometimes an alternative to a full stop (period), enabling related material to be kept in the same sentence; it marks a more decisive division in a sentence than a comma. If the semicolon separates clauses, normally each clause must be independent (meaning that it could stand on its own as a sentence). In many cases, only a comma or only a semicolon will be correct in a given sentence.

Correct:	Though he had been here before, I did not recognize him.
Incorrect:	Though he had been here before; I did not recognize him.

Above, "Though he had been here before" cannot stand on its own as a sentence, and therefore is not an independent clause.

Correct:	Oranges are an acidic fruit; bananas are classified as alkaline.
Incorrect:	Oranges are an acidic fruit, bananas are classified as alkaline.

Dates and time

Dates

Full dates are formatted as "June 17th" or "June 17th, 2021". Try to avoid using numerical formatting unless it is absolutely required. If it is required, it is recommended to use MM/DD/YYYY.

Months

Months should be spelled out in full such as "January" instead of "Jan".

Possessives

Singular nouns

For the possessive of singular nouns, including proper names and words ending in s, add 's (my daughter's achievement, my niece's wedding, Cortez's men, the boss's office, Illinois's largest employer, Descartes's philosophy, Verreaux's eagle). Exception: abstract nouns ending with an /s/ sound, when followed by sake (for goodness' sake, for his conscience' sake). If a name ending in s or z would be difficult to pronounce with 's added (Jesus's teachings), consider rewording (the teachings of Jesus).

Plural nouns

• For a normal plural noun, ending with a pronounced s, form the possessive by adding just an apostrophe (my sons' wives, my nieces' weddings).
• For a plural noun not ending with a pronounced s, add 's (women's careers, people's habits, mice's whiskers; The two Dumas's careers were controversial, but where rewording is an option, this may be better: The career of each Dumas was controversial).

Official names

Official names (of companies, organizations, or places) should not be altered. (St Thomas' Hospital should therefore not be rendered as St Thomas's Hospital or St. Thomas Hospital, even for consistency.)

First-person and second-person pronouns

Under no circumstance should these be used in an article unless they are being quoted. For example, if there is an article about yourself, you aren't allowed to put "I like..." You must use a third person pronoun or the name of that individual or entity.

Vocabulary

Contractions

Avoid contractions, which have little place in formal writing. For example, write do not instead of don't.

Formality

Inserting misinformation

Inserting misinformation is prohibited and will degrade the accuracy of an article. Please be respectful and do not insert any misinformation.

Insults

When editing an article about an enemy, do not use insults to refer or make fun of the enemy. Although to some it may be tempting, it is not allowed. Agentpedia is an online encyclopedia for content related to Microsoft Agent. Filling enemy pages with insults only removes most of the validity Agentpedia has. You are only allowed to insult the enemy on the talk page of the article, the enemy's talk page, or on your own talk page.

Obscenity

Articles are not to be filled with obscenity under any circumstance. This includes swears, insults, or excessive vandalism.

Other article requirements

Bias

Agentpedia aims to have little to no bias on its content pages. Pages that demonstrate extreme bias will be edited or deleted. You may contact admin or edit the page yourself if you believe the information in it is too biased.

Categories

All articles must use the proper and correct category. For example, a piece of software using the "Software" category.

Infoboxes

All articles that are on an entity, software, website, or community must have infobox present.

No opinions

You are not allowed to use opinions in an article unless you are quoting or stating what another person has said. E

Correct:	He stated that he believes...
Incorrect:	I think that...

Page templates

Proper template usage is required on all pages. This means not using a Wikipedia template on an article that does not have over 50% of its content from Wikipedia. Here is a list of page templates with a short description:

This article is a stub. You can help fix this by adding information to it.

The incomplete template is the stub template and indicates an article is incomplete or needs more information.

This article is protected. Only a certain group of users are able to edit this article.

The protected template is used to state whether a page is protected. This template cannot be present if the defended template is also present.

This article contains potentially outdated information and needs to be updated.

The outdated template is used if content on a page is severely out of date and needs to be updated.

This article has over its 50% of its content from Wikipedia. You may use information in the page to find the source.

The Wikipedia template is used when an article contains 50% or more information from Wikipedia.

The stub section template is used for when a specific section of a page needs to be expanded with more information. This does include galleries.

This article may contain extremely biased information against TMAFE or another group. This article needs to be re-written or modified for a neutral point-of-view.

The bias template is used when an article may have a very noticable bias in it.

Trivia

All articles are required to have a Trivia section, a section which is a quick summary of facts about the topic in the article.