Xenharmonic Reference:Guidelines

Introduction

XenBase is a wiki whose content serves the foremost purpose of facilitating the composition of music, rather than the mere documentation of theoretical concepts. It is a place for approaches of all kinds, especially those that break from the established language of the xenharmonic community, such as regular temperament theory.

This is not to say that mainly theoretical or mathematical content is unwelcome on XenBase. Rather, its presence simply needs to be justified: a piece of theory belongs in every place where it is relevant, that is, where it can reasonably be said to be useful for the average xenharmonist to know about when trying to understand or use a particular interval, tuning, temperament, or scale.

Browsing some special pages may be helpful for understanding the way XenBase works, namely Special:AllPages and Special:Log/upload.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Text_formatting and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_guidelines, for inspirations for this page.

General guidelines

Please attempt to specify what something is and how it's useful in the page before providing its derivation.

Temperaments should all redirect to the page List of regular temperaments unless there is enough practical compositional information to write an article. The same goes for edos in EDO#List of edos. In general, long pages with many related topics are preferable to a plethora of stub pages.

Articles should preferably contain much more text content than image/table content.

Refer to scales and other concepts by their names, rather than systematic identifiers, if present - e.g. "mosh" as opposed to "3L 4s" - especially in page titles. To reduce confusion, in page bodies, specify name (identifier) if necessary (e.g. "mosh (3L 4s)"). An exception is made for EDOs - refer to 6edo as "6edo", not "whole tone scale" - and non-comma just intervals.

'''Bold''' is to be used for title terms, and ''italics'' to be used for emphasis.

Guidelines for advanced content

Some theoretical information on a normal article may still be important but may also be difficult for beginners to understand. This should be put, at the user's discretion, in {{adv|}}, like: advanced temperament data. If a section takes an extended tour deep into the weeds (generally speaking, mathematical derivations such as anything involving Taylor series), however, it is recommended to split it off as a separate advanced page.

Advanced pages are still subject to the above general principles, save that their intended audience is meant to be users hungrier to understand how a certain concept is derived or generalized. This distinction implies that advanced pages are usually NOT supposed to be linked directly from general content unless it is clear that the link leads to a more complicated discussion.