Wiki standards

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

Citing by Volume, Book, Chapter and Verse

"The New Message will ultimately be contained in six volumes and possibly more. Each volume will contain two or more books, and each book will be organized into chapters and verses. Therefore, the New Message from God will be structured in the following way: Volume > Book > Chapter > Verse." (from Introduction to God Has Spoken Again)

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."

Use sentence case for Step/chapter titles from Steps to Knowledge and Greater Community Spirituality, following NKL usage as found in books and on website. I.e., capitalize only first word and proper nouns (and words pertaining to the Divine only when pertaining strictly to the Divine, e.g., Knowledge vs. knowledge).

Use sentence case for wiki page headings! Originally the idea was to facilitate interior links and as a rule is only sometimes beating out title case. No biggie. --Mary s (talk) 10:19, 1 June 2016 (PDT)

Media Files

Images should be no taller than 160px x 280px or so. Images only, no text. Unresolved software issue prevents sizing after posting.

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.

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.

Optimal page layout

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

Quotes & Quotation Marks

• All quotations should be as brief as possible: two paragraphs maximum. If a quotation is more than one paragraph long, merge the paragraphs into one.

• All direct quotes should be wrapped in quotation marks, to differentiate them from paraphrases or summaries. [However, please separate different quotations from the same chapter or teaching with close quotation marks.]

• 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.

• Best practice is use of ref tags (not required). 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"

• All pages with ref tags need this header added:

==References== <references>

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.