Explanatory essay about the Wikipedia:Manual of Style
This is the Styletips project, which gives useful advice to editors on writing style and formatting in bite-size chunks from the Manual of Style and related pages. For the complete schedule of Styletips, see below.
Please place suggestions on the Talk page. The objective is to keep the focus of each tip narrow and to express it simply and briefly.
Although the requirement of minimal change in direct quotations is strict, a few purely typographical elements of quoted text should be conformed to English Wikipedia's conventions without comment. These include the following:
Use the style chosen for the article: unspaced em dash or spaced en dash.
Set apostrophes and quotation marks straight, not curly.
Remove spaces before punctuation such as periods, colons, and %.
When integrating the quotation into the grammar of a larger sentence, downcase the first letter of a quotation that is in upper case purely because it starts a sentence in the source (It turned out to be true that "a penny saved is a penny earned").
But generally preserve bold and italic face, and the variety of English.
For a listing of current collaborations, tasks, and news, see the Community portal. For a listing of ongoing discussions and current requests, see the Dashboard.
