Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Computing and electronics

NOTE: This guideline is currently a work-in-progress (WIP).

This guideline describes stylistic conventions to be used when referring to computer software names, technical computer software/hardware terms, trademarked software/hardware names, as well as computer code and formatting. This guideline attempts to address the need for a more consistent stylistic syntax for encyclopedic. It also attempts to facilitate web accessibility to make web pages easier to read and navigate, not only for those with disabilities, but for all readers. With more consistent use of wiki syntax for technical content, it will also be easier to justify developing software to assist increasing accessibility. Examples may include, but are not limited to:

• context-specific formatting and customization, such as font type and size adjustment
• enhanced text-to-speech synthesis and parsing for technical acronyms, abbreviations, and code snippets by implementing templates
• more precise Wikipedia search queries and indexing related to code
• language-specific syntax highlighting for code blocks and code snippets (already implemented)

Software

This category includes stylization guidelines related to software.

Currently, there is a growing use of unconventional stylized software names and terms that make in difficult to be consistent for encyclopedic content. In this guideline, the term software name refers to any technical name/term/acronym/abbreviation of an object, entity, or idea that is used in the context of computer software and/or computer programming which is not commonly as a standard English word.

Examples

The goal is to be able to distinguish between the following:

• software name that follows English-readable traditional sentence capitalization (proper nouns) applicable for encyclopedic use (e.g. Grep)
• the software author's preferred or commonly used stylization of software name (e.g. grep).
• name of the published software package, especially if the package name differs from official name
• software name referred as a command on a command-line interface, often uncapitalized (e.g. "use the ls command to list directory contents")
• name of man page for a command on a command-line interface, often includes a number in parentheses (e.g. man(1))
• stylization of software name found in official trademark or logo, which may not be stylized the same way in the software author's official text

• There are instances when a software author's trademark/logo stylization is inconsistent with their plaintext stylization (e.g. lowercase Latin letter "f" in Facebook logo). For cases when the stylization is unique only in images or logos, the stylization does not need to be mentioned unless the Wikipedia article is describing the images/logos themselves. See also MOS:TMSTYLE.

• name of common decision control or looping statements (e.g. "in the 'for' loop")
• name with numbers as superscripts or subscripts
• name with punctuation (e.g. Pop!_OS)

Another goal is to make the following more consistent:

• key codes, keyboard keys, key combinations/shortcuts
• use of various types of code blocks (e.g. various types of inline code blocks used on WP:MOS itself)

Hardware

This category includes stylization guidelines related to hardware.

Computer hardware may include technical names and terms that are often trademarked or part of standardized specifications. These also may not follow conventional English stylization.

Examples

• name with numbers as superscripts or subscripts (e.g. I2C)
• acronym or abbreviation as name (e.g. S.M.A.R.T.)
• name that have punctuation
• hardware specifications using standardized units (e.g. GHz, GiB vs GB)

• It is important to differentiate units with metric/SI prefixes (e.g. gigabytes or GB) from units with binary prefixes (e.g. gibibytes or GiB). Although certain computer hardware (i.e. semiconductor) industries continue to market their products with traditional metric prefixes (e.g. 16 GB of memory), the actual capacity will generally be in binary powers (e.g. 16 GiB of memory). For example, 16 gigabytes (GB) is exactly 16,000,000,000 bytes, whereas 16 gibibytes (GiB) is exactly 17,179,869,184 bytes (which is 1,179,869,184 bytes or around 1.2 GB more than 16 GB). See also IEC and JEDEC. This type of confusion is compounded by the fact that hardware vendors also reserve some storage for overprovisioning.
• use of non-breaking spaces before units