Preamble

Within-article consistency of formatting

By long-standing convention and as detailed at the Manual of Style, a Wikipedia article needs to use consistent formatting. Because there are a number of external style conventions that exist, articles are vulnerable to creeping inconsistency through being edited potentially by hundreds of editors. These inconsistencies are often difficult to identify quickly, and this script has been developed as an aid to the careful manual oversight of consensus formatting rules.

Functions

Functions performed include:

• add correct hyphenation
• add convert template for simple non-metric units of measure (metric covnversion) *NEW FEATURE added September 2023
• superscripted ordinals
• Celsius spelling errors
• Convert degree symbols into ° symbol, ensure preceding space
• add missing space between wikilinks
• Celsius or Fahrenheit
• Fix common naming error (be careful with this one)
• full stop and nbsp fixes
• hash fixes
• improper capitalisation within section headings
• removing links from within section headings
• other improper capitalisation
• rem bolding from linked AND bolded terms
• rem leading and lagging spaces within wikilinks
• rem linked copyright symbol
• rem redundant spaces underlining and punctuation
• remove scroll bar for reflists
• remove commas from numerical values in convert template
• remove flagicons from birth and death
• remove leading zeros from convert template
• Remove surprise or 'Easter egg' diversions linking unit name to orders of magnitude articles
• symbol for 'times' and dashes
• turn letter 'x' into symbol '×'

Installing the script

1. Open your common.js in edit mode (alternatively, go to your user page and append "/common.js" to the end of the URL and open the page in edit mode).
   • If you prefer to load this only on a specific skin, such as monobook, open your monobook.js in edit mode.
   • If you make a straight copy of this script, instead of "importing" it, you may not benefit from the enhancements and bug-fixes that are made from time to time. In the latter case, you may choose to watchlist this page so you will know when to update your copy for modifications to this script.
2. Copy the following code onto the JavaScript page you have chosen in the previous step:

   importScript('User:Ohconfucius/script/formatgeneral.js'); // [[User:Ohconfucius/script/formatgeneral.js]]
   

3. Save the page and (re-)load it – refresh the cache by following the instructions at the top of your JavaScript page.
4. Bookmark the script page. This will be your cue to purge the cache on your browser for any updates to take effect.

Disclaimer: Use at your own risk and make sure you check the edit changes before you save.

• If you have automatic userscript installation enabled, you can simply visit User:Ohconfucius/script/formatgeneral.js and click "Install" at the top of the page.

Actions

Once you are in edit mode, there is a button in the toolbox in the left margin

• General formatting function – executes the formatting script, adds an edit summary, and then displays a diff of the edit.
• Downcasing of certain strings is achieved by use of magic bullets. These may show up in the edit window as being wrapped in the ((subst:lc:STRING)) template. Upon saving, these will become lower case strings.