Consumer Action Taskforce:Documentation/Style guide

This guide outlines the writing and formatting standards for CAT Wiki articles. Our goal is to ensure consistency across articles, while making content clear and accessible to readers. By following these guidelines, we can maintain a professional and reliable resource for documenting anti-consumer behavior.

Article structure

Every article must begin with an introductory lead section, a concise summary of the topic that appears before any headings. The introduction should provide context and define the topic's relevance to anti-consumer behavior. After the introduction, organize your content using clear section headings.

For article organization:

• Place any infoboxes and images in the lead section, right-aligned
• Use sections and subsections to organize content logically
• Do not skip heading levels (e.g., don't jump from level 2 to level 4)
• Only introduce a heading level if there will be more than one item at that level (e.g., if there is a 1.1, there should be a 1.2)

Article titles and headings

Article titles and section headings should be recognizable and precisely descriptive while remaining concise. They should follow sentence case, capitalizing only the first word and proper nouns.

Title formatting requirements:

• Use sentence case (e.g., "Product history", not "Product History")
• Do not begin with articles ("a", "an", "the") unless part of a proper name
• Use nouns or noun phrases (e.g., "Early life", not "In early life")
• Avoid punctuation unless part of a name.
• Do not use special characters other than dashes -, parentheses () and the ampersand &.

Section heading guidelines:

• Keep headings unique within a page
• Avoid links in headings
• Do not include citations or footnotes in headings
• Do not refer redundantly to the article subject (use "Early life", not "Company's early life")
• Do not phrase headings as questions

Text formatting

Writing style

CAT Wiki articles should maintain a neutral, factual tone while remaining accessible to general readers. Content should be clear, concise, and well-organized. Avoid needlessly complex sentence structure or terminology, when the same information can be conveyed with simpler constructions. Write as simply as possible while maintaining precision and clarity.

Regional consistency:

• Choose one spelling standard (American or British English) within each article
• Use regional spelling conventions for region-specific topics
• Maintain consistent date and number formats throughout

Quotations and punctuation

We use logical punctuation to enhance clarity in technical documentation. This means placing punctuation where it logically belongs rather than following traditional rules.

Quotation guidelines:

• Use double quotation marks for direct quotes
• Use single quotation marks for quotes within quotes
• Place punctuation outside quotation marks unless part of the quoted text

Example: The company stated that their product was "completely secure", but evidence suggested otherwise.

You can also use the <blockquote> </blockquote> tag to get results like below:

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, a former chairman and CEO of Nestlé, in the 2005 documentary ``We Feed the World`` shared his opinion on water as a human right:

The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution.The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value.

Boldface and italics

Sometimes it is prudent to denote the importance of a fact using formatting in an article. To achieve this avoid the use of boldface. In general boldface should only be used when automatically applied (for example in section titles or citations). In order to emphasize a term use italics while also trying to avoid overusage or use in overly long sentences to avoid diminishing the effect.

Other acceptable uses for italics include:

• Titles of referenced works in text (e.g. books, articles, documentaries etc)
• Names of court cases
• Non-English language terms

Do not use italict to format quotations, see Quotations an punctuation above.

Numbers and units

For clarity and consistency in numerical content:

• Spell out numbers one through nine in prose
• Use numerals for numbers 10 and above
• Always use numerals for measurements, statistics, and prices (supercedes the above two rules)
• Include commas in numbers over 999 (e.g., 1,000)
• Ranges or connections should use en dashes instead of hyphens, including
  • Number ranges: "The estimated number of affected customers was 100–500"
  • Year ranges: "Baby Boomers are those people born within the years 1946–1964"
  • Name connections: "The New York–London flight takes several hours" or "Gell-Mann is known for his work with Nishijima on the Gell-Mann–Nishijima formula"
• Use the 24-hour clock for times
• Use ISO date format (YYYY-MM-DD) in technical contexts

Initialisms (and acronyms)

The first appearance of an initialisms and acronyms must be spelled out, with the initialism in parentheses (if it is intended to be used in the rest of the article). For instance, do not write “DRM” in an article without having its first appearance in the article rendered as “digital-rights management (DRM)”. Link the expanded term (rather than the initialism) where possible.

Page links

When linking text in articles, only link the first instance within the article. For instance, on an article about a Sony product, do not link each appearance of the word “Sony”.

Citations and References

Reliable sourcing is crucial for establishing CAT Wiki's credibility. All factual claims must be supported by citations to reliable sources.

Source requirements:

• Include access dates for online sources
• Archive links should be used where possible to prevent link rot

Citation formatting:

• Place citations at the end of the relevant sentence (or clause), after the period
• Group multiple citations supporting the same statement
• Use ref tags for inline citations
• Provide full source information in the References section

Templates

Templates help maintain consistency across articles and provide structured information. Template names use the PascalCase variation of camel case formatting (e.g., InfoboxProductLine, IncidentSummary).

Common templates include:

• Infoboxes for structured product or company information
• Notice templates for article status
• Citation templates for standardized references
• Navigation templates for related articles