Digital skills for collaborative OER development/Style guide

The guidelines provided here are used to create a consistent look and feel to the pages included in this course.

Language

Capitalisation

Consistent with standard practice, capitalise the initial letters of proper names, except where common practice suggests otherwise, and write common nouns in lowercase letters. Some specifics:

• Write open educational resources in lowercase letters, when the term is used to describe a type of learning resource.

Spelling

Use Commonwealth English spelling of words, rather than US English spelling. When in doubt as to customary spelling, be consistent. Consistent spelling contributes to the professional look and feel of the finished course.

• See wp's spelling comparison chart for guidance.

Titles

Enclose titles of short videos, or other short creative works in quotations.

Abbreviations

Add guideline here.

Citations/References

Use clickable endnote citations, using wiki code positioned adjacent to the referent text: <ref>citation details</ref>, rather than in-text parenthetical citations, for example (author, year).

Locate endnote citations (using the code <references/> in a section called "Notes" (level 2 header) at the end of the page.

Use APA style for citations (see the APA Formatting and Style Guide section in the OWL Purdue Online Writing Lab for specifics) with the following exceptions:

• As indicated above, use endnotes for citations, rather than in-text citations with an associated reference list. We prefer this due to the ease of coding and using endotes in WikiEducator.
• Use an external link to the original work, for example with the title of the work, rather than including the full url at the end of the citation.
• Format dates as dd monthname yyyy, (e.g., 30 January 2011), including as much of the information as available. If date is unknown, use "No Date".
• If a reference work is a web page or wiki page without a specific date of publication, include the date the information was retrieved at the end of the citation (e.g., Retrieved 30 January 2011).

Formatting and design

Links

• Use internal link when linking to a WikiEducator page that is a course page which will be part of the course snapshot.
• Use external links to all WikiEducator pages which will not be included in the course snapshot.
• Include link to Wikipedia article (or other reputable source) for first use in course of potentially unfamiliar terms.
• Use shortcut code to create links to Wikipedia articles: [[w:name of article|sentence text]].

Images

• Images wider than 320px can be problematic on portrait mobile phone layouts. To address this issue, center these images on the page.