The Manual of Style (MOS) is a core policy on the wiki that governs the style and formatting of article content. This differs from the Layout Guide, which focuses on the structural layout.
Please note that this policy is a work in progress.
Perspective
In-universe
Something that is in-universe (IU) is considered to take place within the universe of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and not the real world. As an example, characters (e.g., Socrates Poole) are within the universe, but their performers (e.g., Christian Clemenson) are not.
All in-universe articles should be presented in past tense, as if the events have already occurred.
Out-of-universe and production
Out-of-universe (OOU) is anything that is centered in the real world. Production articles in particular are related to the production of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (e.g., performers, production staff, episodes).
Neutral point of view
All articles must be written from a neutral point of view.
Grammar and spelling
Language
As both the wiki and the show are American in origin, American English spelling and grammar is preferred on all articles (e.g., color instead of colour, traveled instead of travelled).
Capitalization
Only the first word in a heading should be capitalized unless a subsequent word or words form a proper name. In the article body, only proper names and the first word in sentences should be capitalized.
Punctuation
Possessives
Words and names ending in the letter S (especially with the "Z" sound) only need an apostrophe (') with no S after (e.g., Socrates' sister instead of Socrates's sister).
Numbers and dates
Numbers falling between one and ninety-nine should be spelled out in most situations. Notable exceptions include dates, ages, and decimal numbers (e.g., 1 January, aged 30, 3.14).
Dates on the wiki are generally formatted as (DAY MONTH YEAR), where the month is spelled out and the year is all four digits. Date ranges should use an en dash (–) surrounded by spaces, e.g., 2 June 1993 – 1 August 1993, except for years by themselves, which should use a hyphen (-), e.g., 1993-1994.
Formatting
Wiki markup should almost always be used in place of HTML (e.g., '''bold''' for bold text instead of <b>bold</b>, especially on articles. Occasionally, this rule may be ignored in templates.
Emphasis
The first usage of the article's title in the text should be bolded, typically in the article's introduction.
Headings
Headings are creating using the equal sign (=) surrounding the heading title, like so:
== Heading ==
Headings span from H1 to H6, but H2 to H4 are the most widely used. H1 headings should never be used in page content, as they're reserved for page titles.