View source for Molecupedia:Manual of Style

{{Ombox|type=notice|text=This page documents Molecupedia's Manual of Style. Where it says nothing, follow the conventions of Wikipedia's Manual of Style. Where the two disagree, this page applies.}}
{{Ombox|type=content|text='''In a nutshell:''' No dashes. Sentence-case headings. A space between a number and its unit. Month, day, year. Quotations exactly as written. Plans described as plans.}}
The '''Manual of Style''' sets out how Molecupedia's pages are written. Molecupedia borrows its layout from Wikipedia and most of its conventions too, and the rules below are the ones it adds or changes. Most were written by the company for its public copy before the encyclopedia existed. A script checks every page against the strictest of them before it is published, and a page that breaks one of those is not published. For where facts come from, see [[Molecupedia:Verifiability]]; for what the encyclopedia is, see [[Molecupedia:About]].

== Punctuation ==
=== Dashes ===
Molecupedia uses no dashes: neither the long one, which Wikipedia uses for breaks in a sentence, nor the medium one, which it uses for ranges. A hyphen with a space on either side counts as a dash, and so does a pair of hyphens. Where Wikipedia would use a dash, Molecupedia uses a comma, a colon, parentheses or a new sentence. A range is written with "to", as in "2019 to 2021", or with a plain hyphen in a table.

On Wikipedia, the templates {{Tl|Snd}}, {{Tl|Ndash}} and {{Tl|Mdash}} print dashes. On Molecupedia they exist only to stop a page from being built.

A quotation that contains a dash is shortened to a fragment that does not, or paraphrased. Quotations are otherwise never altered.

=== Quotation marks ===
Use straight quotation marks, double outside and single inside. Quotations keep their original spelling, capitals and punctuation, including mistakes, which are marked with {{Tl|Sic}}. The instructions for the company's mascot say that he traveled through "interimensional{{sic}} space", and the entry for the [[200-micron laser-drilled pore]] reports "Phmic{{sic}} behavior", and both are reproduced that way. The company's essay that calls blood counters "Coulter Counters" keeps its capitals inside the quotation, while the article's own text writes [[Coulter counter]]; see [[Talk:Nanopore]].

== Capitalization ==
Headings are in sentence case: "Release, rename and relicensing", never "Release, Rename And Relicensing". The first heading on a page is at level two.

Names that the company writes in lowercase keep their lowercase letters, even at the start of a sentence or a heading: [[demonpore, inc.]], [[demonpore 64]], [[demonpore.com]], [[keltar.ai]] and [[epicquest.bio]]. Their articles carry {{Tl|Lowercase title}}.

The encyclopedia is Molecupedia. The word Wikipedia refers only to the encyclopedia whose layout Molecupedia borrows, to its policies, or to the 500 XP quest quoted at [[Molecupedia:Quests]], which asks for "an awesome (and accurate) wikipedia page".

== Numbers, units and dates ==
Whole numbers from zero to nine are written as words, and larger numbers usually as numerals. Units are SI, with a space between the number and the symbol: "5 nm", "200 mV", "3.1 nA". The name micron, which the General Conference on Weights and Measures dropped from the SI in 1967, appears only in quotations and in names taken from the company, such as the [[200-micron laser-drilled pore]].

Dates are written month, day, year: "October 25, 2026". Citations take ISO dates, which the software displays in the same form. The one exception is the signature on a talk page, which follows Wikipedia's and puts the day first: "05:12, 25 October 2026 (UTC)".

Molecupedia does not predict. A year that has not yet happened does not appear in its own voice, and a quotation that names one is used only if it is needed.

== Spelling ==
Molecupedia uses American spelling. Quotations and the titles of cited works keep their own.

== Words ==
A short list of words is banned outright. The list is not reproduced on this page, because a page that contains one of the words is not published.

A sentence does not deny one thing in order to assert another. It says what the thing is.

Promotional language from the company appears only in quotation marks, attributed, and followed by {{Tl|Peacock inline}}; see [[Molecupedia:Conflict of interest]]. The encyclopedia does not describe itself as funny.

== Tense and status ==
Plans are written as plans. The [[MR1 Nanopore Reader]] is a design that had not been built or measured when its files were published, and every article says so. Its license appears in the past tense for the GNU Affero General Public License, which covered it from October 16 to October 21, 2026, and in the present tense for CC0, which covers it now. Story is written as story: [[Keltar]] arrives from another dimension "in the story", and in the article's own voice he is a felt puppet.

== People ==
Five people connected with the company are named: its two founders and three investors. Everyone else who has worked on its instruments, software and games is credited by role. Usernames on talk pages and in page histories are invented.

== Images ==
A render of the MR1 Nanopore Reader is captioned as a render of an unbuilt design. An image made with generative software is captioned as such, and the caption says what the real thing looked like where the image gets it wrong. The model for this is the infobox caption in [[Coulter counter]]: "A diffusion model's idea of a 1950s Coulter counter. The real Model A used a glass sample tube with a jeweled aperture, a mercury manometer and vacuum-tube electronics." Diagrams of science are drawn by code, from the equations in the article. No generated image depicts a real person.

== See also ==
* [[Molecupedia:Verifiability]]
* [[Molecupedia:Neutral point of view]]
* [[Help:Contents]]