Wiktionary:Normalization of entries

This is mostly an index of topics discussed in 2006 thread User talk:Connel MacKenzie/Normalization of articles with comments on how they would apply to Wiktionary today, as of 2015. By all means feel free to edit it.

List of norms

Whitespace and characters

1. No whitespace at the start or end of a line.
   1. Consequently, no lines consisting only of whitespace.
   2. Lines beginning with whitespace are formatted in monospace font by the software; these should not occur in entries.
2. Not more than 1 blank line in a row.
3. No tab characters.
4. All whitespace or non-printing characters other than space and newline must be encoded as HTML entities, such as   or &ltr;.
5. No other HTML entities allowed, these should be converted to UTF-8. & -- > &
6. No leading or trailing whitespace in templates (name, parameter name and value), links, categories and so on. For templates, newlines are allowed for clarity.

Headings

1. One blank line before all headings, including between two headings, except for before the first language heading.
   1. Right-aligned content such as {{wikipedia}} or images count as blank lines for this purpose.
   2. No blank lines between {{also}} and the first language heading.
2. No blank line after any heading except when another heading immediately follows.
3. No whitespace between = and heading title, i.e. ==English== and ===Noun===, not == English == or === Noun ===.
4. No templates in headings (=={{abbreviation-old}}==, as well as {{acronym-old}} and {{initialism-old}} are deprecated, but still allowed until they are fixed).
5. The final = of a heading must be immediately followed by a newline: no content after a heading on the same line, including spaces, tabs and comments (such as ==Old English== <!-- also known as Anglo-Saxon -->).
6. ---- before each language heading heading except the first.
   1. One blank line before ----
   2. One blank line after ----
7. All templates, boxes, or images should be in a certain language section except for templates like {{also}} that are designed to be at the very top and do not have anything to do with any specific entries.
   1. To be discussed: What to do with unicode character boxes when there is no Translingual section?

Lists

1. One space after "#", "*" and ":" on the start of a line.

POS sections; headword lines; senses/definitions

1. Every POS header must be immediately followed by a headword line.
   1. Floating boxes like {{wikipedia}} can appear on a line in between, but maybe we want to discourage this?
2. One blank line after the headword line.
3. POS sections may contain at most one headword line and one definition list. Thus, entries like this or this are not correct.
4. (Controversial/Unwanted) Definition lines should be sentences, starting capitalized, ending with a period "."
   1. Alternate proposal: If they are sentences they must be capitalized and end with a full stop, if they are simple glosses they should be all lower case with no full stop.
5. All POS (or equivalent sections) must have at least one sense, starting with "#", before the next heading. If no definition is known, use {{rfdef}}.
6. Reducing the number of third level headings in en.wikt, by combining things like "===Pluralish noun===" or "===Noun phrase===" into 'standard headings' like "===Noun==="
   1. Note: Apparently it does not require any change at the moment as we already have a number of standard-ish headers here and maybe here. Any serious change to that would most likely require its own discussion.
7. When necessary, indicate gender and number only with templates (e.g. {{m|fr|livre||book|g=m}}, {{m|fr|livre||pound|g=f}}). Use {{g}} only if no other template can be used.
8. Context labels should use {{context}}, {{label}} or the shortcuts {{cx}} and {{lb}}.

Translation sections

1. Language names should not be linked or templated:
   • Neapolitan: {{t|nap|acqua}}
2. One blank line between each translation block (i.e. between {{trans-bottom}} and {{trans-top}}).
3. Markup such as gender should be provided within the {{t}}/{{t+}} template, except for qualifiers, which should use {{qualifier}}.

Categories and interwikis

1. One blank line before categories.
2. One blank line before interwiki links.
3. Categories at the end of each language section.
4. Each category and interwiki link on its own line.
5. Interwiki links may only appear at the very end of a page.
6. Interwiki links must link to the exact same spelling and are usually maintained (added/removed/sorted) by bots.

Others/Technical

1. All HTML tables converted to wikitables
2. No module invocations ({{#invoke:).