The Mental Health Wiki layout and style guide is a guide to the basics of laying out an article.
The content should be understandable to most members of the public. Contributions should be written in a neutral 3rd person tone. Contributors should aim to write at the 8th grade reading level.
Style and formatting should be consistent within an article. Where there is disagreement over which style to use in an article, defer to the style used by the first major contributor.
Each article should contain a lead section with introductory text summarising the content and a table of contents. It is particularly important that the content of this section is understandable to most members of the public.
Sections usually consist of paragraphs of running prose. Between paragraphs—as between sections—there should be only a single blank line. Very short (e.g. single sentence) or very long sections and subsections should be avoided.
Section headers are used to introduce sections and subsections. They help to clarify articles by breaking up text, organizing content, and populating the table of contents. The initial letter of a title or section heading is capitalized. Otherwise, capital letters are used only where they would be used in a normal sentence e.g. ‘Causes of anxiety disorders’ not ‘Causes Of Anxiety Disorders’.
Headings follow a six level hierarchy, starting at Heading level 1 [H1] and ending at level 6 [H6]. Header 1 is automatically generated as the title of the document, and is never appropriate within the body of articles. Sections start at the second level with consecutive subsections at the third, fourth, fifth and sixth levels. There should be a single blank line between sections.
Section names should be unique within a page as this aids navigation.
Articles on mental health disorders should have the following layout, (although not all articles will have all these headings):
Articles on treatments should have the following layout:
Articles on topics other than disorders and treatments do not have the above structures. If appropriate, it may be helpful to model a new article on an existing one of appropriate structure. If a new template is required please provide one.
Breakout boxes can be used if appropriate, for example for:
The use of breakout boxes is optional.
Bullet points should be minimized in the body of the article, if they are used at all; however, a bulleted list may be useful to break up what would otherwise be a large block of text.
Bullet points are not usually separated by a blank line.
Use the same grammatical form for all elements in a list where possible, and do not mix the use of sentences and sentence fragments as elements. Use a consistent style for bulleted lists.
Optional appendix sections containing the following information may appear after the body of the article in the following order:
1. "Works" or "Publications" or "Bibliography"
2. "See also"
3. "Notes" and "References"
4. "Further reading"
5. "External links
These are in the form of bulleted lists, ordered chronologically or alphabetically where appropriate.
Links to external sites should only provided for informational purposes. Links that are included for commercial purposes will be removed.
Write out both the full version and the abbreviation at first occurrence, not separated by full stops or blank spaces.Avoid abbreviations when they would be confusing to the reader, interrupt the flow, or appear informal or lazy. For example, approx. for approximate or approximately should generally not be used, although it may be useful in a table.
In running text use ‘and’ instead of ‘&’.
Italics are used sparingly to emphasize words. Capitals are not used for emphasis on Wikipedia: “It is not the same thing” rather than “It is NOT the same thing”Italics are used when mentioning a word or letter or a string of words up to a full sentence: The term neurosis was first defined in…
Italics may be used for phrases in other languages and for isolated foreign words that are not commonly used in everyday English.
Wherever reasonable, preserve the original style, spelling, and punctuation of a quote. Use (…) to indicate omissions from quoted text. Do not selectively quote or omit text where doing so would alter the meaning of the quoted text or would omit essential context.
The author of a quote of a full sentence or more should be named.
As a general rule, in the body of an article, single-digit whole numbers from zero to nine are spelled out in words; numbers greater than nine are commonly rendered in numerals (other than in tables).
Commas are used to break the sequence every three places: 2,900,000.
Use metric units.