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Project: Support resources for open content licensing in education

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Style and consistency guidelines

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:

• Capitalise the initial letters of Creative Commons when referring to the organisation or the name of one of its licenses, even though its logo is written in lowercase.
• Capitalise the initial letters of the name of a specific Creative Commons license: "Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License".
• When referring to one or more licenses in the abstract do not capitalise the nouns license or licenses: "a Creative Commons license" or "Creative Commons licenses".
• Write open education 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

Abbreviate Creative Commons as CC when it is used as an adjective, as in CC licenses, CC tools, CC users.

• Do not abbreviate Creative Commons when it is used as a proper name.
• Include a reference tag for the first use of CC on a page, which refers the reader to the full name and a link to the website.

Abbreviate the CC licenses beginning with CC and then the license components connected with dashes, e.g., CC BY-SA.

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).

Suggested style guideline

Add suggested guidelines which may need a consensus decision. That said, be bold when adding style guidelines above, consistency is more important than value-based preferences.

• Add suggested guideline here