Wikipedia:WikiProject Rugby union/Article style

Whilst naming and editing rugby union-related articles, editors often encounter recurring questions of style. Wikipedia:WikiProject Rugby union/Participants have agreed to the following style guidelines to keep a consistent look and feel to rugby union articles throughout Wikipedia. These styles also fall within the WP:MOS guidelines and WP:NC policies.

See also: Wikipedia:Manual of style

Naming Conventions

Parts of this section are disputed; see Talk for details.

Rugby union shall be written in lower case, such as rugby union, except when starting a sentence, such as in this one.

See the Rugby union discussion page for more information.

Also see wikipedia naming conventions, for naming articles.

Can I add a plea here not to use 'rugby' to mean 'rugby union'. I know that in many countries rugby=rugby union and if league exists then it is called 'league' and almost never refered to as 'rugby'. However this is not universal and in some parts of the world e.g. much of Yorkshire, Lancashire amd Cumbria rugby almost always means 'rugby league'. I have tried to go through both sets of articles 'correcting' this usage. This is very much a bone of contention among English league fans who see it as marginalising rugby league. I can see only a couple of 'correct' usages of 'rugby' for the 15 man code 1) when required to do so by the title of the article - the RWC is the Rugby World Cup; it would be silly to alter this to RUWC 2) talking about 'champagne rugby union' or 'counter-attacking rugby union' is odd.GordyB 17:18, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Summarise and link

Particularly when writing history of rugby union, be careful not to duplicate information. The standard way to deal with possibly duplicate information is to keep one major source of that information and wherever else it is useful, summarise and link to it, in the following manner.

Place the link under the heading of the section you are writing and before any text.
Use {{main}}, like this {{main|Article name here}}. It will appear like this:
If necessary or relevant, also link to a specific section in the article

You can see an example here.

However, it may be that yours is a complicated subject and for the reader to get the whole picture with as little reading as possible, it is recommended you write light paragraphs that link to the relevant articles in the text.

Referencing

When adding information/statistics, particularly regarding popularity, be sure to add a reference, by adding this after it (using Wikipedia as an example:

<ref name=wiki1>{{cite web | publisher=wikipedia.org | title=Main page of Wikipedia | url=http://www.en.wikipedia.org/main| accessdate=1 April | accessyear=2006}}</ref>

Not be sure to change all the names, publishers, titles, urls, and access dates to your specific reference.

Then, put a references section at the bottom of the page, but not below the external links. Like this:

==References==

If you are using the same source a few paragraphs later, re-reference like this: