Rules and Guidelines for writing an Article

Asalamualaikom . Below are the writing guidelines and rules of formatting. It is very important to go through these as we wish to keep the style universal throughout the whole site, and besides that, there is other important information in them on how to lay it out and etc. It is also recommended that if you want to write an article, let one of the mods or admins in discord know and they will open a channel up for you where people can contribute help, ideas and resources and any improvements after the article is finished.

If you need help deciding what to write about, check out the Articles that need creating page.

Guidelines to writing articles

  1. Make sure to add the correct Category to your Post. If the Category doesnt exist, then you can go ahead and make one.
  2. Reference every fact, claim and argument, using the Qur’aan, Sunni books of ahadith, or any other sources you deem acceptable as your primary sources.
  3. Avoid weak and non-Sunni sources unless there is a reason.
  4. Diversify your sources; try to find the opinions of various scholars (across different schools of thought) on particular issues.
  5. Be as detailed as possible without losing cogency; no rambling or convoluted sentences.
  6. Use only Arabic and English in your main work, with popular alternative language terminology in brackets or appendices.
  7. Translate/transliterate accurately/phonetically [1], and include correct diacritical marks [2].
  8. Add subsections to your articles (like Wikipedia) to organise specific information.
  9. Add the honorifics to Allah’s name [3] and the prophets’ names [4].
  10. Add descriptive pictures and embed videos, but no representations of Allah, the prophets or the Companions.
  11. Do not make major changes to any articles or to the website unless approved.
  12. Write completely in your own words; there will be proof-reading and editing stages involving others later.
  13. Cross-reference to other articles and videos, whether on WikiMuslim or externally, and add references for further reading if for some reason it’s inappropriate to include the extra information.

Note –

[1] E.g. it’s “aljannah” not “jannah.”
[2] Reference: Ā, ā, ḥ, Ī, ī, ū.
[3] سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ
[4] ﷺ

Rules of formatting

  1. The main article heading is by default in Heading-1 form or h1 in html – let it be so.
  2. The headings in the articles are to be in Heading-2 form or h2 in html.
  3. The sub-headings are to be in Heading-3, Heading-4 and so on as per the paragraph level. This needs to be consistent throughout the document.
  4. Use Paragraph form or $lt;p$gt; tag in html to write paragraphs.
  5. The font style and size cannot be changed except through html specification in the Text editor. Please do not change the font style and size.
  6. All references are to be put in footnotes. The software will take care of the numbering automatically. The link may be embedded in some text or may be bare. It is preferable to embed the text in the title of the article / media that it leads to. The references are added to the botom automatically.
  7. Do not use bold unless absolutely necessary.
  8. You may point to some other articles under a section ‘Sources and Further Reading’. This section must be at the end of the article, above the references division.
  9. Write an introductory paragraph, at least a few lines, in the beginning below the article title and before the first heading.