Acadēmīa:Style

Guidelines

This page explains the guidelines that are established by custom or consensus regarding the creation and formatting of entries.

Orthography

Acadēmīa does not specify a standardized spelling. Everyone can write according to their own taste. However, this spelling must be in common use. Own invented spelling conventions are not desired. The following things should be observed:

Consistency: Once decided, spelling should not be changed in the middle of an entry.
Proper names: Proper names should be written in the form in which they occur (i.e. Australian Defence Force vs. US Secretary of Defense). Orthographic adjustment should not be made.

Lemmata

The headings of the entries are called lemmata (sgl. lemma). Since the Acadēmīa is an English-Latin dictionary, the main entries should have an English lemma.

Capitilization

Acadēmīa entries are case sensitive. Entries should only be capitalized if they would also be capitalized in the middle of a sentence. Words that have a different meaning depending on upper or lower case should have their own entries (e.g. polish vs. Polish). With the help of the template {{See also}}, the entries can be referred to one another if one could confuse the entries due to a too similar spelling. Otherwise, words with the same spelling and different meanings get the entry.

Country-specific lemmas

The lemmas should be chosen in such a way that they are common and understandable across countries (e.g. glasses instead of spectacles or eyeglasses). The exception is proper names (see the "Orthography" section above).

Redirects

The following lemmas should not have their own entries, but only be redirected:

Synonyms that do not differ too much in scope of meaning
Country-specific vocabulary that otherwise does not differ
Latin Lemmata (for more informations see Latin conventions)
Relational adjectives (e.g. "interrētiālis" should be redirected to "internet")
Derived verbs (e.g. "blōgīre") should be forwarded to the respective noun ("blōx")

The reason for the last two clauses is that English cannot always form relational adjectives and/or derived verbs from a noun. It is therefore advisable to redirect the adjectives/verbs to the same entry as the underlying noun in order to facilitate the search.

Redirects should nevertheless be provided with categories for the sake of clarity.

Sectioning

Headings should always be inserted before the actual entry. A brief explanation of the lemma should be provided. In the case of ambiguous lemmas, the headings also serve to disambiguate. The definitions/explanation of the lemmas can at best be taken from the most common English-language encyclopedias/dictionaries/encyclopedias and shortened if necessary. Copyrights must not be violated.

Entries

The actual entries are created using templates. For formatting, we refer to the documentation for the individual templates, which can be seen on the respective template pages.