Help:Manual of Style

The following style guide describes the preferred writing and formatting styles for articles submitted to TWC Archive. Adherence to this guide ensures that articles on TWC Archive are understandable to as many readers as possible, consistent from page to page, coherent throughout each individual page, and encyclopedic in language.

For guidance on formatting and style topics not covered in this TWC Archive-specific guide, we encourage the use of Wikipedia’s Manual of Style.

General style and formatting

All articles submitted to TWC Archive must adhere to a professional, encyclopedic format appropriate for a wiki comparable to that of Wikipedia or other MediaWiki-based projects (please note: this service is not Wikia; avoid making it as such). Articles should be free of punctuation, grammar, and capitalization issues before any initial publication. Articles should, where appropriate, make use of headings and subheadings to logically divide sections of information; articles that are simply one large paragraph containing various types of information are unacceptable and may either be subject to deletion or a complete rewrite. If guidance is needed for what headings to include in your article, consult existing articles. Most pages have a see also, external links, and references section towards the bottom of the page; other headings will vary depending on the subject of the article.

Article titles

Article titles

Titles for articles on TWC Archive should aptly and succinctly describe the subject matter.

The first letter of an article title should be capitalized unless the name of the subject matter is stylized with an initial lowercase letter, i.e. wxTV.

Programming

Articles relating to programming seen on The Weather Channel should use the original formatting of the program's title when possible. Any alternative names for a program, if applicable, should be noted in the article body, the corresponding infobox, or both. Programming titles should be appropriately italicized. If the name of a program is the same as an article that is not a program, and the other article does not already have a disambiguation of its own in parentheses, the article title for the program should feature such a disambiguation.

If the program is a long-form program or other episodic or serial program, a disambiguation should be formatted as Title (TV series). Otherwise, in the case of live programming, the format Title (TV program) should be used.

Personalities

Titles for articles relating specifically to personalities seen on The Weather Channel should use the name of the person as used by the network itself. If the person went by a nickname while with the network, this should be reflected in the title. The best example of this is Dave Schwartz; this article title uses his name as used by The Weather Channel, while the article body begins with the full version, David Schwartz.

Titles for The Weather Channel fandom personalities should use the most well-known name associated with them. In most cases, this will likely be a YouTube or forum username; however, in some cases, the real name of a personality has been publicized by the user in question and may be the name most associated with the user in the community. It is up to user discretion to determine which name should be the title for living individuals. Articles for deceased members of the community should use the user's real name if known. In both cases, the article body should begin with the user's real name if disclosed and public, i.e. Charles Abel-Lear for The Weather Chazz. Even if a user has disclosed their real name in the community, a user featured in an article may request to remove a name from the article if desired; in this case, all references to the user would use the most popular username.

Vocabulary common to The Weather Channel and its community

Due to the nature of its subject matter, articles on TWC Archive often cover many of the same topics related to the network. Some of these terms can be formatted differently from one source to another, but should ideally appear in a consistent format from article to article.

Weather Star units

Weather Star is the preferred formatting on TWC Archive for the name given to systems generating The Weather Channel's local forecast segments at local cable headends. This term also appears in other sources as WeatherStar and WeatherSTAR; however, for the sake of consistency, the formatting previously mentioned is to be used in any article covering a Weather Star unit or fan-created material related thereof. This derives from the original formatting as seen on physical Weather Star units themselves. Exceptions can apply; for example, the website name WeatherSTAR Emulator Forum uses the formatting WeatherSTAR because such formatting is original to that name.

Weather Star III is the preferred formatting for the third iteration of the original model Weather Star unit. It is also sometimes referred to as the WeatherStar 3000, WeatherStar III, Weather Star 3000, WeatherSTAR 3000, or WeatherSTAR III; these alternative forms would be acceptable only if they appeared in the title of a website or are found in quotations.

IntelliStar is the preferred formatting for the newer digital and hybrid models of Weather Star units of that name. The alternative form IntelliSTAR may appear in some sources, but this would only be acceptable if it appeared in the title of a website or is found in a quotation.

Other terms

Simulator is the factually correct and preferred term for an unofficial program that replicates The Weather Channel's local forecast segments. Use of the erroneous term emulator may occur in sources but would be acceptable if the name of a program or website featured in an article used that terminology; for example, the aforementioned WeatherSTAR Emulator Forum uses the term in its website name.

Completion of articles

All new pages created on TWC Archive must contain a baseline of information before going public. TWC Archive staff highly recommend working with potential articles within your personal sandbox page, or via a userpage/sandbox subpage to avoid as much incompleteness as possible.

• You can access your personal sandbox by clicking the "Sandbox" link at the top right of any desktop version of the website, or by clicking the "user" menu button in the top right of the mobile website.
• You can create subpages of your userpage/sandbox by adding a forward slash to the end of your user URL, along with the page name (ex. User:[your username]/[desired page name]).

At the least, all new article pages must contain at least one to three paragraphs (of which the first is the initial paragraph seen before section headings begin). Incomplete articles must be identified as such by placement of the template {{Incomplete}} at the top of the article page. From there, an active effort must be made to bring the article to completion, or as close to that as possible, in a timely manner.

Relevance and necessity of articles

TWC Archive allows for a much larger collection of articles relating to The Weather Channel, its programming, personalities, fan community, and related topics than most other wiki projects. Nonetheless, all articles created through this platform must adhere to a standard of relevance to the aforementioned topics as well as necessity.

Relevance

Articles here must be related to The Weather Channel and previously associated categories in some manner. An example of an article with uncertain adherence to relevance criteria would be AccuWeather, which has little immediate relevancy to these categories depite being a weather-focused network. Meanwhile, The Weather Cast, a short-lived competitor to TWC, would have more immediate relevancy as it emerged from a programming carriage dispute between The Weather Channel and Dish Network.

Necessity

Articles created on TWC Archive should hold to a standard of necessity. A separate article for a given topic which is covered within the scope of another article will likely not be necessary unless enough information on the topic is compiled to necessitate its separation. For example, a separate article on a founder of a community site covered on TWC Archive would not be necessary unless enough information publicly and freely exists to populate the contents of a new page.

Content import procedure

Contributors to TWC Archive may import pages from other wikis running MediaWiki that allow use through a Creative Commons license. This can be ideal for adding new and needed content as a baseline for original future contributions. This is acceptable as long as the following procedures are followed:

• Go to the desired article on the source wiki and enter source editing mode, selecting the entire contents and copying them.
• Enter the desired article name into TWC Archive's search bar and search for the name, at which point a dialog will appear asking if you want to create a page with that title (if it does not already exist).
• Enter the page editor for the new article and enter source editing mode, pasting the previously copied content from the source wiki.
• While editing the article, include the ImportedFrom template in its external links section. The title used in the template should be that of the original wiki article, and the URL should be the URL of the specific revision of the article that was exported, which can be accessed by navigating to the original article's history page. Once added, save the page.

From there, the content of the page may be edited to change wording and/or add additional content.

Sectional imports policy

When importing content, care must be taken to import full pages that are rightfully cited to ensure a proper understanding of the where original baseline material on the page originated. Copying and pasting sections of articles from other wikis into existing articles original to TWC Archive is unacceptable practice, especially when done without any note that the content is copied from another source. Such edits will be treated as plagiarism and dealt with accordingly, including complete rewrites of articles or even deletion.

It should go without saying that the creation of new article pages solely to copy uncited and improperly sourced information from other wikis is also unacceptable and also constitutes plagiarism. A complete rewrite or deletion of the article will apply to any page created in such a manner.

Media files

Images

The inclusion of images to visually support article contents is highly encouraged where possible. However, images uploaded to the site should adhere to the following quality control guidelines:

• Where available, images should have a source, author, and appropriate attribution noted on the file page. This is done when uploading a file through Special:UploadWizard.
• Images should be cropped appropriately. For example, a screenshot of The Weather Channel with black letterboxing bars at the top and bottom should be cropped to remove the bars.
• Images should have appropriate transparency, depending on the type of image. This applies especially for program logo images that are not direct on-air screenshots.
• Images can be uploaded at any size, but when added to articles, care must be taken that the image formatting scales the image down to a size proper for its place in a given article. If unsure how to do this, check the formatting of an image on an existing article using the source editor.
• As stated in TWC Archive:Rules, adult/pornographic images are fully prohibited.

Audiovisual content

Directly uploading audiovisual content (videos and audio, including recordings of music played on The Weather Channel) to TWC Archive is not allowed for copyright reasons (see TWC Archive:Rules). Some audiovisual content may be permitted on a case-by-case basis, requiring administrative approval. Despite this, on TWC Archive, video content related to The Weather Channel is regarded as a legitimate source of reference material for information included in articles. When citing information for an article, links to TWC-related videos hosted on YouTube or other platforms are acceptable source material. Video links are also allowed within a given article's external links section.