How to Write an Entry

How to write for the Encyclopedia, and your responsibility as an editor.

Volume I was a printed document written by a handful of people from the class of 2028, descended in turn from the <Encyclopædia NLCS>. This is the same encyclopedia, except anyone with a kis.ac account can write in it now.

Please have a look at the rules below (adapted from Volume I). Housekeeping — reverting, take-downs, locking, bans — lives in Housekeeping. Spelling, capitalization and spacing are set out in Ground Rules and Resolutions.

What This Encyclopedia Is For

From the Disclaimer to Volume I:

this encyclopedia is meant for informational, satirical, or humorous purposes and is not intended to target anyone for hate or to hurt them emotionally;

this encyclopedia will also aim to provide the student body with a comedic resource to enjoy as a break from academics;

Those two clauses outrank everything else on this page. An entry that is humorous because someone gets hurt fails the first clause, and no amount of good writing can be an excuse. Satirical pages will always be marked with a disclaimer.

Consent

Also from the Disclaimer, and the single most important line for a wiki that names real classmates:

all information in this encyclopedia has been written with consent and if not, should be immediately taken down upon request;

In practice:

Before you write about a person, tell them. "I'm putting you in the Encyclopedia" is enough. If further inquired, describe the project and show them this page. Do not ask for consent multiple times if once rejected. Take a look at the Rejected List first before writing.
If the subject asks for something to come out, it comes out. You do not get to argue about whether the joke was fair. See Housekeeping.
Write with their name attached the way you would say it to their face, in person.

Voice

Write it straight. The comedy lives in the gap between the flat encyclopedic register and the absurd thing being described. Volume I, on the associate principal:

Since Mr. Striffler doesn't teach any lessons, he sometimes spawns in normal classes randomly. Whenever he enters the classroom, looking for a student, you know that something has happened to that person.

No one is shouting. There is no "LOL". The sentence reports the facts and lets "spawns" do the work.

In general:

Use third person, past or present, with complete sentences.
No ALL CAPS ranting, no strings of exclamation marks, no emojis.
Put the punchline in a footnote when it would break the flow of a paragraph.
Slang and inside jokes get defined, not just used. a Grade 9 reading this in three years should still follow it.

Marking Satire

An entry may be informational, satirical, or humorous, and one entry is often all three in different paragraphs. The reader has to be able to tell which is which, so the joke carries the label, not the whole page.

Select the passage and press the satire button in the toolbar (the speech mark with an exclamation in it). It wraps the text in {! and !}:

Mr. Striffler is the associate principal and AP Coordinator.
{!He is also believed to spawn in classrooms without warning.!}

What that does to the entry:

The passage renders highlighted, so no reader mistakes it for a plain statement.
The entry grows a disclaimer at the top saying it contains satire.
Marked passages are hidden until the reader asks for them. An entry reads as what it claims to be true first, and the jokes are one click away.

Rules of thumb:

Anything about a real person that is not literally true gets marked. If you are unsure whether a sentence is a joke or a fact, that is exactly the sentence to mark.
Marking is not a license. A cruel line is still cruel with a highlight on it, and the first clause of the Disclaimer still outranks it.
Do not mark a whole entry out of laziness. An entry with every sentence marked tells the reader nothing.
Markers stay inside one paragraph. Select several and each gets its own pair. Formatting inside a marked passage (bold, italics, a link) breaks the markers, so mark the plain sentence.

The Shape of an Entry

People (teachers, staff, students) carry the standing fields from Volume I in a box beside the text, then a quotation if there is a good one.

You do not have to type it. File the entry under Teachers or Students and the editor offers the layout — it asks first, and it never removes anything you have already written. What it inserts is a table:

| Mr John Striffler | |
| --- | --- |
| *No photo yet* | |
| **Age** | Unknown |
| **Role** | Associate principal, AP Coordinator |
| **Subject** | — |
| **Room** | 204 |
| **Likes** | Dragon Descant |
| **Dislikes** | Students running in the hallway |
| **Other** | Associate principal and AP Coordinator of KISJ HS |

The first two rows run the full width of the box — the name, then the photo. To add one, paste an image address into the Photo box above the editor; the layout writes it into the right row for you. There are no uploads yet, so the address has to point at an image that already lives somewhere. A row runs full width when its second cell is empty and its first carries no bold label, which is why an unanswered field stays a field instead of turning into a banner.

Teachers get Role, Subject and Room; students get Class of and Clubs. Everything else is shared. Not every teacher teaches a subject — a principal or a counsellor has a role and no subject — so fill whichever applies and leave the other one out. Leave a field blank if you do not know it — a half-filled box is still worth having, and another editor will fill the rest in.

Below the box, use ## sections. Examples of section names include:

Quotes — things the subject actually said (ideally verbatim), one per line.
Controversy & Incidents — the incident, told impartially.
A named section for a recurring bit, e.g. Mr. Striffler's random visits to classrooms.

Slang lives in the Slang Dictionary, not here. Add the term there — it has its own form, with a headword, a definition, an example, an origin and an Other line — and link to it from any entry that uses it. A term defined in two places disagrees with itself within a month. Slang used inside an ordinary entry should link to its term the first time it appears — a short gloss beside the link helps, but the link is what does the work.

Events, Complaints, Miscellaneous are ordinary prose. Give an event a date. A complaint should describe the thing complained about precisely enough that someone who was not there understands the grievance — the 83 Minutes and The Bell entries in Volume I are the model.

Titles

Title an entry the way people say it out loud, capitalised as a name: Adventure Day, Club Fair, Lunch Line, Mr. John Striffler. Teachers keep their honorific. Students go under the name they use at school. Do not put the grade or the year in the title.

Links

Wrap any title in double brackets to link it: [[Adventure Day]]. A link to an entry no one has written yet shows up red.

Link generously. An entry that mentions six people and links none of them is half an entry.

File the entry too. The editor has a Categories row under the text box — click one of the existing chips, or type a new name. The creation of a new category is generally not advised unless deemed necessary.

Footnotes

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE read the footnotes!

They are half the fun and are often intentionally added to induce humor and give you background information!

Footnotes work here exactly as they did in print. Write Something[^1] and put [^1]: the actual joke at the bottom of the entry. Use them for the aside, the correction, the score-settling, and the context (anything that would derail the sentence it hangs off).

Korean and English

Use English primarily unless an issue cannot be explained in a convenient manner without the use of Korean. In which case, an entry that is mostly Korean is fine. Give a gloss the first time a term appears for non-Korean readers.

On Length

A long encyclopedia means a rich school culture, not a padded one. However, this does not mean writing fillers to move the number is desired in the slightest.

It is ideal to keep a page between a 2 to 10 minute read. If a page is too short or long, consider making edits.

Word-count milestones are tracked in Housekeeping.

What Never Goes In

Anything written to make a specific person feel inferior.
Anything about a person who has asked to be left out.
Grades, disciplinary records, medical or family matters, home addresses, phone numbers, personal accounts. Exception: school kis.ac addresses.
Sexual content about students, in any register, including as a joke.
Anything you would delete if a parent, a teacher, or the subject opened the page while standing behind you.
Any false claims, false accusations, misinformation, etc. If unsure, please note it.

The founders of the <Encyclopædia NLCS> were "assembled at the school office for interrogation" and the project ended up alive but not public. This encyclopedia is public to the whole school by design. Write like it.