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Purpose
The purpose of this manual is to create style guidelines for editing Iceland-related articles in the English Wikipedia to conform to a neutral encyclopedic standard, as well as to make things easier to read by following a consistent format. The following rules do not claim to be the last word. One way is often as good as another, but if everyone follows standards, Wikipedia will be easier to read, use, write and edit. This manual is open to all proposals.
For more general guidance on editing conventions, see the (general) Manual of Style and also, where applicable:
Spellings of names
In accordance with the Manual of Style and naming conventions, Wikipedia should use the name most commonly used in English. This may differ from the Icelandic name, e.g. Westfjords rather than Vestfirðir and Left-Green Movement rather than Vinstrihreyfingin - grænt framboð; but it may also be the Icelandic name, e.g. Vestmannaeyjar rather than Westman Islands and rímur rather than rhymes (Iceland) or the like.
The use of Icelandic characters like 'æ', 'ö', 'þ', 'ð' is sometimes controversial and their frequency of use in printed text is hard to determine due to OCR errors. One must also be careful to avoid false positives; words which occur in Icelandic phrases are not English usage, even if the Icelandic text is quoted in an English book. If the usage of other works of general reference is clear and consistent, it should be preferred to debatable counts of usage. In practice most articles on Icelandic subjects do use Icelandic characters but it is still advisable to tread lightly when moving pages.
If an article has a name with one or more characters not used in modern English, diacritics, or both, remember to create redirects from other likely spellings. For example, Súðavík needs a redirect from Sudavik, and probably also from Súdavík since some texts may keep accent marks on vowels but change 'ð' to 'd'.
Icelanders' names
As explained in Icelandic name, Icelanders do not have patrilineal surnames; the commonest pattern is instead for the personal name of the father to become the patronymic of his children. There are varieties on this, but no matter what the sources are of their names, Icelanders are, with very few exceptions, referred to either by full or by personal name.
Therefore an article about, say, Trausti Valsson should refer to him not as "Valsson" but as "Trausti".
There are a very small number of exceptions to this rule. If in doubt, please ask at the talk page of WikiProject Iceland.
Sorting
The alphabeticization of Icelanders' names should be that of the first name. Therefore for Trausti Valsson not
[[Category:Icelandic scientists|Valsson, Trausti]]
but instead simply
[[Category:Icelandic scientists]]
The magic word {{DEFAULTSORT:}} is seldom inherently necessary, but in order to deter other editors (or a bot) from adding it in a way that's unfortunate for Icelanders, it may be a good idea to add it correctly yourself, with an SGML comment pointing here. Thus:
{{DEFAULTSORT:Trausti Valsson}}<!--See: [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Iceland-related articles)]] -->
Wikipedia's alphabetization cannot be relied upon to treat characters other than the 26 English letters correctly. Sort keys should use ae for 'æ', o for 'ö', and th for 'þ' and 'ð'.
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 10 May 2008, at 19:13.
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