Talk:Brief guide to contributing

Some topics for discussion

• Should sections use a horizontal line in addition to the horizontal line inserted by the section heading? I personally find it distracting, and it renders strangely on my computer (a thin horizontal line followed by a thick horizontal line).
• Should American or British spelling be used (e.g. "capitalized" vs. "capitalised"), or does it make no difference? (I am an American, so I use that spelling by default, but I can fix it if there's call for it.) Use British spelling, and correct Americanisms.
• Should text generated using large language models, (such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) be rejected or only used sparingly? I personally use all of them in my writing process, but never use any actual text except for possibly a word or a short phrase. My argument for this is that if I put my name on something, I'm responsible for it because I "own" it. --Chuckhoffmann (talk) 20:49, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

Notes

While Susanna Clarke uses numbered footnotes in her novel, the form (superscripted numbers surrounded by square brackets) seems to clash stylistically with the form for chapter references (chapter numbers surrounded by square brackets). Additionally, implementing explanatory notes using templates and the Mediawiki Cite extension seems to be a non-trivial exercise. I propose using the the traditional ordering of typographic symbols for notes in the text, namely:

1. Asterisk - *
2. Dagger - †
3. Crossed dagger (or double dagger) - ‡
4. Section sign - §
5. Double vertical bar - ‖
6. Pilcrow (paragraph symbol) - ¶

If there are more than six notes on a page, each symbol is then doubled, i.e. ** for the seventh item, †† for the eighth, etc.

There are a few problems with this, chief among them being that an asterisk starting a new line is consumed by the Mediawiki parser and becomes an unordered list item. For example:

• The asterisk at the beginning of this line displays as a dot.

I use HTML entities to get around this, typing * wherever I want to use an asterisk as the first character of a line. There may be other ways, and it might be possible to devise a templatized solution for this.--Chuckhoffmann (talk) 21:12, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

Latinate sentence construction

While writing using the ornate language and style of the period is fun, it is both hard to do well and mentally taxing for the reader to parse. Remember that you are ultimately writing for a modern reader, and you would do well to use the same "modern bones, period ornament" style that Clarke uses in her novel.--Chuckhoffmann (talk) 19:23, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

No head canon

I advocate that nothing that cannot be reasonably deduced or extrapolated from the text of Clarke's works or sourced from real world facts be included in this wiki. While it may make things more fun, it risks the wiki becoming a work of fan-fiction rather than an informative guide to Clarke's works and worldbuilding.--Chuckhoffmann (talk) 12:01, 12 September 2025 (UTC)