First the Other News, because it's quick:

- I've noticed that the Mary Sue pages slated for deletion are still there, so consider this a final notice to save anything you want from them over the weekend. I will start removing them next week.

- Also, it seems to me that "Latest Mission Releases" is misleading, possibly restrictive. Who's for making it "Latest Story Releases"?

Now for What I Am Up To:

Anybody who follows the Recent Activity page on the wiki has probably worked this out by now, but I figure I should make it generally known: I have embarked on a project of massive proportions that will involve editing probably almost every single page we have. Why? Because this is my particular brand of insanity. I like doing low-energy, repetitive stuff that will all add up to something in the end. It's nice to fill up the time when my actual job is slow.

What I've been doing is to systematically go through pages by category (so far, I've done the Continua and Department of Mary Sues ones) and make sure that titles are being treated correctly, and also any SPaG or general work that needs doing so the pages look good and more or less similar to other pages of their type. But mainly, my motivation is titles, because we of the Internet have a terrible bad habit of just capitalizing everything and calling it good enough, because we don't always have access to HTML or other methods of text formatting.

On the wiki, however, we do. And given that spelling, punctuation, and grammar is one of those things we like to tell people to do right, it seems odd to me that we should continue to ignore this one facet thereof.

I'm posting about this here because it's really, really discouraging to look at the Recent Activity page myself and find that people are ignoring the work I've already done. Yes, I say ignoring, because I've seen this on pages I have already edited, including the Latest Mission Releases: people will add a new mission and utterly neglect to follow the rules, even though every previous entry now does and I've put guidelines at the top of the column in hidden HTML. And it looks bad, folks, especially when it's inconsistent with other stuff on the page.

I'm open to people doing things differently than I do if the rules are different in your style of English—it doesn't particularly matter if you use single or double quotes for titles of short works, for instance, just as long as each individual page is consistent. I just want you all to start paying attention and do something.

If you need them, these are the rules of thumb:

- Titles of long works (e.g. novels, movies, TV shows, video game franchises) get italicized. Exceptions: some names of series, such as the Firebird Saga, don't get italics; and the names of games such as Dungeons & Dragons don't, either. I'm not sure why this is so for some series and not others; it may be that some of the names used aren't official titles of the series. Anyway, check other sources if you aren't sure.

- Titles of short works (e.g. chapters, short stories, missions, badfic, individual songs and poems) get "double" or 'single' quotes, depending on your preferred style. I tend to include all badfic in this category regardless of length, partly because I'm not sure where the official divider between "long" and "short" is, and partly because I don't feel a badfic deserves being treated like a novel even if it does have a lot of words.

- All titles get capital letters, but not all words in a title get them (at least in North American usage). Articles (a, an, the) don't, and prepositions (on, in, of, for, to, etc.) generally don't, with some exceptions: if they're used adverbially or adjectivally, emphasized, or are longer than four letters, for instance, they may be capitalized. Pretty much everything else gets capitalized regardless of length. The first and last word in the title are always capitalized, though, regardless of the part of speech.

So now you know! Please help me by paying attention to what's gone before and not making me have to clean up after you every time you add a mission. Thanks!

~Neshomeh