Wikipedia articles are composed and formatted according to the Manual of Style (MOS). MOS sets the house standard on Wikipedia for attributes like link formatting, capitalization, punctuation, and sections. MOS includes guidelines for biographies, citations, titles, dates and numbers, proper names, and many other stylistic details.
Some examples of the elements of style in the MOS are:
Article titles—use normal body text capitalization for titles (beginning letter, capitalize proper nouns, etc.), and apply the singularform in titles wherever possible.
Capitalization—do not capitalize all words in section headings, or non-proper nouns
Link placement—list external links in their own section at the bottom of an article
To place the MOS template at the right on your User page for easy reference, edit your User page and copy/paste: {{style}} (including the curly braces).
Please follow the MOS guidelines when you update an article.
1. Magic pipe trick: Synonymous article titles may be clarified with terms in parentheses, like this: [[Self (psychology)]]. But when you want to include such a link in the body of an article, this would look rather awkward. So all you have to do is use the "magic pipe trick", like this: [[Self (psychology)|]]. Notice the pipe ("|") character stuck in there at the end of the link? That makes the link look like this: Self, without having to type the name of the link after the pipe! This trick also works with namespaces, so that [[Wikipedia:Tip of the day|]] (again notice the pipe character) displays like this: Tip of the day.
2. Plural trick: While editing, you will often need to make a link to a plural. For example, suppose you wanted to link "Fred Foo was famous for his study of puddles" to puddle; you could link it like so: [[puddle|puddles]]. However, you can save time by instead writing [[puddle]]s. This also works for adjectives ([[Japan]]ese), verbs ([[dance]]d), and any other suffixes or prefixes, like [[bring]]ing. It does not, however, work for some irregular verbs. For example, [[try]]ied does not work; you have to use [[try|tried]]. Nor does it work with apostrophes needed outside the wikilink like: [[J. R. R. Tolkien]]'s.
