Wiki standards

Here are the basic standards for posting and editing in the wiki. Discussion and questions are in the discussion page.

Quotation Marks

All direct quotes should be wrapped in quotation marks, to differentiate them from paraphrases or summaries. If the material is more than one paragraph, use opening quotation marks for each paragraph but closing quotation marks only at the end. Or combine the paragraphs into a single one if it makes it more readable.

If a quotation is more than one paragraph long, use opening quotation marks for each paragraph but closing quotation marks only at the end, or merge the paragraphs into one.

However, please separate different quotations from the same chapter or teaching with close quotation marks.

Capitalization, punctuation and square brackets

Punctuation and capitalization should be edited as needed for clarity, so long as it does not corrupt the meaning of message. There is no need to put [S]quare brackets on a capitalization, and probably not for ellipses to prematurely end a sentence... However, please do use ellipses to remove segments from the middle of a quote. eg. "God has... spoken again."

Quote size

All quotations should be as brief as possible: two paragraphs maximum.

Original writing

Please avoid all original writing for now. However, members of the Society will be writing summaries or blurbs on some pages, so please do not delete those.

Outside material

Outside material should kept to a bare minimum, carefully sourced, directly (and helpfully) supporting a statement from the New Message, and not in violation of copyrights.

New pages

Every page should be a topic, a subject, referred to in the New Message. The clearer and more direct, the better. There are a few exceptions: the feeds page, and this one, for example.

Optimal page layout

There is not yet a standard, but the following sequence could work as a guide: Sections for a page

Citation

All quotations should be cited: if it's from a book, then please include book title, Chapter number and chapter name. If it's from a CD or individual Revelation, please include the title and date of the Revelation.

Ideally and ultimately, ref tags can be used to make footnotes. To do this, rap the reference like so:

<ref>The New God (January 5, 2025)</ref>

and then make a single reference list for the page, in the References section, with:

<references/>

"Which winds up looking like this"

Asterisks should no longer be used for citation. They are too confusing. For speed and convenience, the reference can be indicated below the quotation with indentation, using four colons. For example:

::::The New God (January 5, 2025)

Then ref tags can be added in later.

Personal Testimony

Personal testimony should not live on the New Message Wiki. If it is relevant, it can be linked to or referred to on another web site.