CZ:Manual of Style

(Provisional draft)

Citizendium broadly follows Wikipedia's Manual of Style. [1] Exceptions are detailed below.

Dates

Dates may be cardinal (1, 2, 11, 23) or ordinal (1st, 2nd, 11th, 23rd). The day or the month may come first; the year, where mentioned, comes last. Many writers like to keep date styles consistent throughout an article.

Boxes

In some cases boxes are needed to highlight side themes or particular key points. To provide clues to meaning it is good practice to use a consistent style among all articles in Citizendium.. the following examples provide color schemes for particular purposes.

Summary of argument and evidence from within Citizendium articles

As in Organism:

The concept of living systems. See Life for a complete explanation. A living system has the informational content and information-processing faculty to remain for a time in a near steady-state as a self-organized system of hierarchical robust modular networks. It works autonomously to offset responses to perturbations, and to reproduce itself, enabled by the influx of energy and matter and by a more than compensatory efflux of waste (disorder), thereby exploiting a far-from-equilibrium state. Finally, it is capable of participating in the transgenerational evolution of the species to which it belongs in adapting to changing environments.

Or in Life:

A living system has the ability to remain for a time in a near steady-state as an organized system. The organization is made possible by the influx of energy and matter and by a more than compensatory efflux of waste (disorder), thereby allowing a far-from-equilibrium state to be maintained.

Key quotes from external sources

Last Paragraph of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." Full-Text Here