Should we create some kind of guidelines for posts formatting?

Question

As many of you know, I like editing posts (proof) to try to standardize formatting on this site. It helps to keep this site clean and it improves quality of the posts.

Here are some suggested rules we can follow for formatting posts:

• Use a capital letter at the beginning of the title, but not for each word in the title
• Use code formatting for code elements, URLs and email addresses and only code formatting
• Apply italic style for file paths or file names and only italic style (.htaccess for example)
• Use blockquote formatting for quotations
• Apply capital letters for each word in a product name ("Google AdWords" and "Google Webmaster Tools", not "google adwords" or "Google webmaster tools"); if you don't know the right way of writing, please search on Google
• Apply capital letters to proper nouns such as "English"
• Use quotation marks around example words such as "another example"
• Apply formatting rules of English (one space after a period, comma, semi-colon, or question mark, but none before)
• Use numbered list for list of defined number of elements
• Use bulleted list for list of undefined number of elements
• Use punctuation consistently in a list (for example all list elements with no punctuation at the end except for questions)

Please feel free to add or update some rules and share your opinion on those suggestions.

Answer 1

Having a standardized guideline for editing is helpful, however the following things should be considered:

• As covered in the Help Center's FAQ on Edit Questions And Answers, edits should attempt to:

make the post substantively better when you edit, not just change a single character. Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged.

So instead of editing the question for a single guideline list item above, consider if there are also other issues that can be improved, and if not, whether the edit would substantively improve the post on its own.

Ideally, editing should be motivated by recognizing that a post is difficult to read, understand, or is missing necessary detail, and that your edits would help to improve these things for others.

• Edit in moderation, as this can flood the Home and Active pages, diluting the number of new questions and answers visible to others.

• It's probably not a good idea to perform minor edits on competing answers, as those might be viewed as an attempt to alter or gain an advantage over them.

• One possible justification for a minor edit is to remove links or product/service recommendations that appear to be an obvious attempt at self-promotion, in which the post would otherwise be informational; if not, just flag it for moderation.

• Lastly, this guideline should be easily found by other members (e.g., as a link from the Help Center).

Answer 2

I am in favor of codifying our style guide. I added a couple items to your list and posted comments with questions about others.