Editorial Guidelines

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This style guide establishes the formal editorial and formatting standards for the encyclopedia and text archive of the Radical Buddhism Project (RBP). The guidelines are designed to ensure structural consistency and clarity across all encyclopedic profiles, original texts, and translations. They are divided over four pages. This page contains the rules that apply to every page on the wiki.

The Guideline Pages

General Writing Standards

  • Tone: All contributions must maintain an objective, rigorous academic tone.
  • Spelling and punctuation: Authors and translators must use American English spelling and punctuation conventions throughout their work.
  • Serial comma: The serial (Oxford) comma is mandatory in all lists of three or more items.


Page Titling and URL Conventions

To ensure universal searchability, technical stability, and ease of academic citability across both international databases and the browser interface, all pages across the entire wiki must adhere to a strict ASCII alphanumeric character set.

General Naming Restrictions

  • No Percent-Encoding (% Codes): Page titles must strictly use characters that are never replaced by percent codes when a user copies a URL from their browser address bar.
  • Script Constraints: Page titles must be written entirely in the basic Latin script without any diacritics, macrons, or special accents (e.g., use Uchiyama Gudo instead of Uchiyama Gudō or Uchiyama Gudô for the literal page title/URL).
  • Permitted Characters: The permitted characters for titles are restricted to uppercase and lowercase English letters (A–Z, a–z), Arabic numerals (0–9), hyphens ( - ), and underscores ( _ ). Spaces are also permitted; MediaWiki converts them to underscores in the URL. Native non-Latin scripts and specialized phonetic symbols are strictly barred from core page titles.
  • Cosmetic Masking: If a page title requires accurate diacritics or native East Asian scripts for correct academic presentation, the page title must still be created using the clean ASCII rule above. The {{DISPLAYTITLE:...}} magic word at the very top of the article body can be used to safely change the visible page heading for the reader without altering the clean underlying URL. (For example, {{DISPLAYTITLE:Uchiyama Gudō}} will show "Uchiyama Gudō" as the page title, without affecting the URL.)
  • Links: The same restrictions apply to the targets of links and templates (e.g., [[Uchiyama Gudo]] and {{Main|Uchiyama Gudo}}). Use the pipe to show diacritics in the visible link text: [[Uchiyama Gudo|Uchiyama Gudō]].

Encyclopedic Pages

  • Standard Rule: Page titles for Biographies, Country Profiles, and Contextual/Topical Articles must be written entirely in the Latin script.
  • Original Names: Native non-Latin scripts (e.g., Japanese, Chinese, Thai) are strictly barred from core page titles and must instead be placed inside the introduction text.


Archival Codes for Original Texts and Translations

Original Source Text Pages

  • Standard Rule: The page title must never be the literal title of the text. Instead, it must utilize a standardized, alphanumeric archival code written entirely in capital letters.
  • The Archival Code Formula: The code must strictly consist of three distinct components packed together without spaces:
  1. Author Initials: Exactly two initials derived from the author's romanized name, ordered with the surname first.
  2. Year Digits: The last two digits of the year the text was originally published.
  3. Keyword Abbreviations: Three letters representing the first letter of the first three primary keywords in the romanized text title.
  • Example: An original source text written by Uchiyama Gudō (UG) published in 1908 (08) titled Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei (無政府共産革命) (MKK) would be titled: UG08MKK
➣ See also: List of Author Codes

Translation Pages

  • Standard Rule: The page titles for all translated English texts must identically mirror the exact alphanumeric archival code of their matching original source text page.
  • The Translation Suffix: To differentiate the translation from the source code, the code must be followed immediately by a hyphen and a capital letter T suffix (-T).
  • Example: The English translation page for the text mentioned above would be titled: UG08MKK-T


Editorial Authorship and Revision Control

To maintain rigorous academic credit and generate accurate data for the "How to Cite" sections, page authorship is dynamically managed based on text contribution tiers. Individual articles do not follow an anonymous crowd-sourced model. The Managing Editor retains final authority over all page author attribution tracking, placement, and group ordering.

Authorship Tiers

  • Main Authors: The individual or individuals responsible for creating the initial text or the vast majority of the current page content. If a page has multiple main authors, their names must be listed in strict alphabetical order by surname.
  • Other Authors: Contributors who have provided significant textual expansion, deep source checking, or substantial structural revisions, but have not overwritten the core baseline argument. These names are appended after the main authors in strict alphabetical order by surname.
  • Text pages: On pages in the text archive, the visible citation credits the author of the text and, on translation pages, the translator(s) as well (see Editorial Guidelines - Texts and Translations). Transcribers are not credited in the visible text, but their work is recorded in the hidden authorship change log.

Revision and Promotion Thresholds

  • Substantial Expansion: Any registered editor who performs a substantial upgrade or expansion to an existing article is entitled to have their name added to the "Other Authors" section.
  • Major Revision and the "50% Guideline": If an editor thoroughly overhauls, expands, or rewrites more than half of the existing article's text, they are traditionally eligible to displace the original creator and be promoted to primary Main Author.
  • The Principle of Qualitative Significance: The quantitative 50% threshold is strictly a baseline guideline, not an automated rule. If a contributor's revisions fall below the 50% content mark but are deemed highly crucial, foundational, or qualitatively more important than the text left unchanged, the Managing Editor may choose to elevate that contributor to the "Main Authors" tier, or establish them as the sole primary author.

Mandatory Moderation Workflow

  • Prior Forum Discussion: Editors are strictly prohibited from executing silent major rewrites or unilaterally altering author lists. Any proposed major rewrite and its subsequent authorship implications must be proposed and discussed within the dedicated phpBB community forum beforehand.
  • Managing Editor Review: The Managing Editor must review the thread, evaluate both the quantitative scope and qualitative value of the proposed changes, and explicitly authorize the structural overhaul before any text changes go live on the wiki platform.

Conventions for Citation Blocks

Every encyclopedic page ends with a "How to Cite This Article" section, and every page in the text archive contains a "How to Cite This Page" section. The templates for these sections are given on Editorial Guidelines - Encyclopedic Pages and Editorial Guidelines - Texts and Translations respectively. The following conventions apply to both.

Name Ordering

  • First Name Listed: The first name in the author sequence must always be inverted with the surname first to facilitate alphabetical indexing (e.g., Doe, John or Chen Boqiang).
  • Subsequent Names: All following names must be listed in their natural, preferred order (e.g., David Smith for a Western name, or Tanaka Tarō for a Japanese author preferring traditional order).
  • Implicit Tiers: Do not use explicit labels like "(Main Author)" or "(Other Author)" in the visible citation text. The tiering is implicitly understood by the ordering: Main Authors are listed first in alphabetical order, followed immediately by Other Authors in alphabetical order.
  • Conjunction: Separate names with commas, and use an ampersand (&) before the final name in the list.

Authorship Change Log

Every citation block contains a hidden authorship change log, formatted as follows: 

<!-- AUTHORSHIP CHANGE LOG
(page version), (update date). Main: (main authors in order). Other: (other authors in order).
(page version), (update date). Main: (main authors in order). Other: (other authors in order).
... etc.
-->

The Managing Editor, or an editor explicitly authorized by the Managing Editor, adds a new line to the log whenever the authorship of a page changes.

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