QBWiki:Style Guide

General

Here is a link to the page on formatting on MediaWiki, the platform that the QBWiki runs on: Help:Formatting. Be sure to flip through this if you expect to be doing more involved work.

Both [[square braces]] and '''triple quotes''' work to bold the subject of a page - though some older pages use square braces, triple quotes is likely simpler and will work even if the phrase being bolded does not link to the page being edited.

Categories should appear at the bottom of the page with line breaks to allow them to be read more easily. c template is a shorthand for writing categories.

Whenever possible, references to forum posts should be added in as <ref>references</ref> rather than external links. A clean format is as follows:

<ref>[forums link "Name of post"] by [[forum user]] » time stamp</ref>

This is easily achieved by copying the header of a post from the title to the attribution, removing the "Post" text that comes from copying the icon and the newline, and wrapping the title in a braces and the user in double braces.

The information used in this reference can be obtained by simply copy-pasting the header of the post in question and removing the "Post" text that appears due to the tooltip of the link icon.

Player pages

Example player
Current college	Black Hills State University (2015-current)
Past colleges	Ball State (2010-2015)
High school	Thomas Jefferson (MO) (2009-2010), Thomas Jefferson (VA) (2006-2009)
Stats	HDWhite • NAQT

Player pages should summarize a player's time as a player, as a writer, and as a member of the community. They should provide sufficient information that someone can know when and where they were active and should have links to any relevant and useful information (e.g. stats). The goal is that a user should be able to visit any given player's page on the wiki and find (or at least be directed to) what they want to know about them.

The most straightforward way to gather the information needed to write someone's page is to visit a page compiling past stats (i.e. NAQT's player pages or HDWhite) and do a search of the forums to see what projects they've worked on.

Infobox

The infobox can hold most of the information which should be on a page. The presence of the infobox often makes some of the text of an article redundant, but it should still be as complete as possible. In general, infoboxes should be given on an opt-out basis - most player pages should have one. The ib template provides a convenient shorthand.

Years active

Players should have all their years active at a given institution listed in their infobox. This should include all years the player was active - for instance, if a player played for their school from the fall of 2018 to the spring of 2021, their infobox should say (2018-2021).

The "(highschool/middleschool) Player active in (year)" categories should be used as well. The year specified by this template is the end of the competition year, so the "Player active in 2014" categories indicates that a player was active in the 2013-2014 competition year. This distinction is outlined in each of the category pages.

The active, activehs, and activems templates are useful shorthands.

Affiliations

Schools that a player has played/coached for should be included as categories on their page, embedded into their infoboxes, and mentioned in the lede of the article. The preference is to include affiliation categories alongside other categories at the bottom of the page, rather than in the infobox next to their years played.

Schools that have changed names

To eliminate confusion and a multiplication of unnecessary redirects or duplicate pages, refer to schools that have undergone a one-to-one name change by their current name in most contexts. E.g., "Truman State" instead of "Northeast Missouri State University," or "Staunton High School" instead of "Robert E. Lee High School," even when talking about a tournament from before the name change. Use in-text explanations or footnotes to clarify as needed.

There may be situations when it makes more sense to use the old name, especially when recounting a primary narrative from a contemporary source, or when the situation is more complicated than a single institution changing its name (e.g. when assigning institutional history from a high school that has since closed and merged into another school). The above should be taken as a general guideline and not an ironclad rule; the principle of maintaining clarity, avoiding the creation of duplicate pages such as "1991 Truman State" and "1991 Northeast Missouri State," and simply explaining the situation somewhere on the page is what is important, and there may be different ways to achieve this goal in different situations.

Other recommendations

Don't make lists of "current club members" or similar. They get out-of-date quickly and are rarely maintained. If you want to do something like this, here are some slightly better ideas:

Link to your school's all-time roster page on NAQT's website. You can find that page via NAQT's search tool.
Label the list "2022–2023 Roster" or something like that. It will eventually become irrelevant if not maintained, but that's a little bit better than it being outright incorrect.

Avoid phrases like "Pat Smith is a current junior at Central High School", as they are likely to get out-of-date. Something like "Pat Smith is a member of the class of 2024 at Central High School" works a bit better.