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The followingis aproposed Wikipediapolicy, guideline, or process. The proposal may still be in development, underdiscussion, or in the process of gatheringconsensus for adoption.
NOTE: This guideline is currently a work-in-progress (WIP).
This guideline describes stylistic conventions to be used when referring to computer software names, technical computer software/hardware terms, trademarked software/hardware names, as well as computer code and formatting. This guideline attempts to address the need for a more consistent stylistic syntax for encyclopedic. It also attempts to facilitate web accessibility to make web pages easier to read and navigate, not only for those with disabilities, but for all readers. With more consistent use of wiki syntax for technical content, it will also be easier to justify developing software to assist increasing accessibility. Examples may include, but are not limited to:
context-specific formatting and customization, such as font type and size adjustment
enhanced text-to-speech synthesis and parsing for technical acronyms, abbreviations, and code snippets by implementing templates
more precise Wikipedia search queries and indexing related to code
language-specific syntax highlighting for code blocks and code snippets (already implemented)
This category includes stylization guidelines related to software.
Currently, there is a growing use of unconventional stylized software names and terms that make in difficult to be consistent for encyclopedic content. In this guideline, the termsoftware name refers to any technical name/term/acronym/abbreviation of an object, entity, or idea that is used in the context of computer software and/or computer programming which is not commonly as a standard English word.
The goal is to be able to distinguish between the following:
software name that follows English-readable traditional sentence capitalization (proper nouns) applicable for encyclopedic use (e.g.Grep)
the software author's preferred or commonly used stylization of software name (e.g. grep).
name of the publishedsoftware package, especially if the package name differs from official name
software name referred as a command on acommand-line interface, often uncapitalized (e.g. "use thels command to list directory contents")
name ofman page for a command on a command-line interface, often includes a number in parentheses (e.g.man(1))
stylization of software name found in official trademark or logo, which may not be stylized the same way in the software author's official text
There are instances when a software author's trademark/logo stylization is inconsistent with their plaintext stylization (e.g. lowercaseLatin letter "f" inFacebook logo). For cases when the stylization is unique only in images or logos, the stylization does not need to be mentioned unless the Wikipedia article is describing the images/logos themselves. See alsoMOS:TMSTYLE.
name of common decision control or looping statements (e.g. "in the'for' loop")
This category includes stylization guidelines related to hardware.
Computer hardware may include technical names and terms that are often trademarked or part of standardized specifications. These also may not follow conventional English stylization.
hardware specifications using standardized units (e.g. GHz, GiB vs GB)
It is important to differentiate units withmetric/SI prefixes (e.g. gigabytes or GB) from units withbinary prefixes (e.g. gibibytes or GiB). Although certain computer hardware (i.e. semiconductor) industries continue to market their products with traditional metric prefixes (e.g. 16 GB of memory), the actual capacity will generally be in binary powers (e.g. 16 GiB of memory). For example, 16 gigabytes (GB) is exactly 16,000,000,000 bytes, whereas 16 gibibytes (GiB) is exactly 17,179,869,184 bytes (which is 1,179,869,184 bytes or around 1.2 GB more than 16 GB). See alsoIEC andJEDEC. This type of confusion is compounded by the fact that hardware vendors also reserve some storage for overprovisioning.
